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The American Prospect - articles by authorenGates Of Privilegehttp://prospect.org/article/gates-privilege
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><b>The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton</b> by Jerome Karabel (<i>Houghton Mifflin, 684 pages, $28.00</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p>In 1958 a young British sociologist and Labour Party official named Michael Young published a book called <i>The Rise of the Meritocracy</i>, coining the now-commonplace term. A mock sociology doctoral dissertation from the year 2030, it looked back over the development of an England that had attained what, for educational reformers of Young's day (and ours), was only a distant goal: true equality of opportunity, a society where success was determined not by connections or lineage or wealth but solely by an exact and foolproof calculation of merit. The formula was simple: intelligence plus effort.</p>
<p>The book, of course, was satire, but it was also a cautionary tale. After all, equality of opportunity, Young wrote, meant “equality of opportunity to be unequal.” Comfortable in the knowledge that the able were rewarded and only their inferiors left behind, the government, and the society as a whole, lost all concern for the less meritorious masses. Even members of the lower classes stopped agitating for any sort of equality; having been given a fair chance, they blamed only themselves for their fate -- that is, a footnote tells us, until they rose up in a revolt that claimed the life of the dissertation's author.</p>
<p>Young's dystopian vision hovers in the background of Jerome Karabel's <i>The Chosen</i>, which arrives -- this may not be a coincidence -- just as high-achieving high-school seniors all over the country enter in earnest into the college-admissions process. Not that many of them will have time to read a 552-page book -- not with essays to write, recommendations to secure, test-prep courses to take, and a few more fulfilling, unusual extracurricular activities to be discovered (and, preferably, led).</p>
<p>But come spring, the unlucky applicants, those called but not chosen, might want to turn to it for solace. Not just because Karabel says the game is rigged -- they'll no doubt decide that for themselves -- but because, right at the start, he emphasizes the fundamental oddness of the system by which Americans today pick their elites: “Just try to explain to someone from abroad -- from, say, France, Japan, Germany, or China -- why the ability to run with a ball or where one's parents went to college is relevant to who will gain a place at our nation's most prestigious institutions of higher education, and you immediately realize how very peculiar our practices are.” </p>
<p>Only slightly less unfamiliar to the French or Japanese education meritocrat would be such staples of the American application process as the interview, the letters of recommendation, the focus on racial and ethnic diversity, and on interests and activities and “character.” </p>
<p>“All in all,” Karabel writes, “the admissions process at America's leading colleges and universities has striking affinities to the system of selection to a private club. Given its historical origins, this resemblance is less than fully coincidental.” His book is an extended explanation -- and a meticulously researched, astutely argued, and (considering how much of it is given over to the machinations of university administration) surprisingly engaging one -- of how that happened. It focuses on the three universities that, more than any others, have over the course of the 20th century defined American elite higher education.</p>
<p>Karabel's central point is that, in a very basic sense, today's admissions process is less meritocratic than it was 100 years ago. Until the early 1920s, all of the “Big Three” had a simple policy: An applicant took the (not terribly difficult) entrance examination, and if he passed was admitted. </p>
<p>Karabel is careful not to take the point too far. Including subjects like Greek and Latin, the exams tested knowledge that most public-school students never had a chance to acquire (For that reason, Harvard began phasing out its Greek requirement in 1886). It's also true that those sons of the elite who couldn't pass the exams, even after repeated attempts, could still be admitted “with conditions,” and that, once admitted, they and their ilk dominated campus life.</p>
<p>Still, Harvard especially, thanks to its markedly liberal and hugely influential President Charles W. Eliot, prided itself on its openness. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt enrolled there in 1900, more than 40 percent of his classmates came from public schools, and many were the children of immigrants.</p>
<p>All of this changed, however, after World War I. Karabel's title implicitly names the cause. It was the increase in the number of Jews winning admission to elite colleges, and the horror their success aroused in the early-20th-century WASP gentleman, that gave us today's admissions process. </p>
<p>The example of Columbia University sounded the alarms at the Big Three. By 1920 the proportion of Jewish students at Columbia had reached nearly 40 percent, and the New York elite abandoned it, sending their sons elsewhere. Even the university's establishment in 1910 of an admissions office (the nation's first) expressly to deal with the problem -- by applying now-familiar admissions criteria like “character” and “leadership qualities” -- didn't stem the tide. It ebbed only with the imposition of a formal quota in 1921.</p>
<p>To avoid a similar fate, the Big Three, seeing a rise in their own Jewish student populations, quickly instituted quotas of their own, Harvard after an acrimonious public debate -- the retired Eliot was adamantly opposed, his conservative successor A. Lawrence Lowell determinedly for -- Yale and Princeton more quietly.</p>
<p>Karabel has combed through the public and private correspondence of the men who pushed these changes through, and he turns up some rather horrifying comments about “the Hebrews.” In 1933 Yale's president, James Rowland Angell, wrote his director of admissions in what Karabel interprets as a joke about the geographic concentration of Jewish applicants, “It seems quite clear that if we could have an Armenian massacre confined to the New Haven district, with occasional incursions into Bridgeport and Hartford, we might protect our Nordic stock almost completely.”</p>
<p>But, Karabel argues, while the new admissions policies were blatantly discriminatory, they were as much about preserving a culture as the purity of bloodlines. In one of the book's most fascinating sections, Karabel uses the story of the Groton School and its charismatically severe founder, Endicott Peabody, to describe the creation of a certain Protestant elite ideal in the late 19th century. At Groton, founded in 1884, Big Three–bound students like FDR (who maintained a loyal, almost apostolic relationship with Peabody until the headmaster's death in 1944), were molded not for academic brilliance but to be paragons of what Peabody called “vigorous, virile, enthusiastic character; a gentle, sympathetic, and unafraid example of muscular Christianity.” </p>
<p>The living conditions were austere, football was mandatory, and brutal hazing rituals were condoned. The schools were set up, Karabel writes, “to expose the young men who went through them to the experience of both obedience and command, often under trying conditions,” to train a certain sort of national, even imperial, leader. At a time when the American Protestant elite felt both threatened by waves of immigrants and emboldened by the country's growing global strength, institutions like Groton -- and the Big Three -- were ruled by “an uneasy admixture of two seemingly contradictory systems of belief: gentility and social Darwinism.” In such a setting, boys from immigrant Jewish families, Karabel writes, “raised in a milieu in which the scholar traditionally occupied the highest place and manliness was judged more by learning than physical prowess,” were a curiosity and, in sufficient numbers, an affront. </p>
<p>What is it, then, that changed between then and now? In part it was the result of concerted efforts by liberal reformers such as Harvard President James Bryant Conant, Yale President Kingman Brewster, and Yale dean of admissions R. Inslee Clark Jr. -- though Conant in particular, Karabel argues, owes his progressive reputation more to public pronouncements than to actual policy changes.</p>
<p>Mostly, however, change came from outside. After World War II and the revelations of the Nazi “Final Solution,” any policy that smacked of anti-Semitism became publicly indefensible, and the Big Three had to loosen their quotas.</p>
<p>At the same time, the Cold War, and the Soviet success in beating the United States into space with Sputnik, created a sense that American higher education was failing to keep pace, and that it needed to better train a new scientific and technocratic elite. Congress declared an “educational emergency”; finding and training the best brains was cast as a matter of national survival. </p>
<p>The huge infusion of federal research money triggered by such concern also changed the financial dynamics at elite universities, making them less dependent on conservative alumni who used the threat of withheld donations to get their way and giving new power to the faculty -- who favored admissions policies based more purely on academic achievement -- because they could attract the federal money. </p>
<p>In general, Karabel argues, the universities' increasingly inclusive admissions policies sprang from institutional rather than moral considerations. The move toward attracting more (or, in the case of Princeton, allowing any) black students he ties to the fear of on-campus radicalism and to larger concerns that the race riots of the mid-1960s were an existential national threat. The decision to admit women, Karabel argues, was driven primarily by a concern that all-male colleges were losing their best male applicants to co-ed competitors, and that doubling the pool of qualified applicants would allow greater selectivity.</p>
<p>Karabel's central point, though, is that all of these changes were carried out within the fundamentally conservative framework set up in the early 1920s to keep out bookish Jews. The carefully maintained racial diversity of today's Big Three, for example, is not merely a matter of removing barriers but of adding minorities to the list of those who get preferential treatment in the admissions process -- a process that remains, at base, fundamentally political, with different constituencies (alumni, faculty, athletic coaches, mobilized minority groups) competing for space in the freshman class. As Karabel puts it, “Power -- including the capacity to shape the very categories used to classify candidates for admission and to designate specific groups as warranting special consideration (e.g. legacies and historically underrepresented minorities, but not disadvantaged whites) -- is at the center of this process.”</p>
<p>Which brings us back to Young's dark satire about the meritocracy. Ultimately, there is a barely resolved tension at the heart of Karabel's book, detailing as it does the many failures of the Big Three to live up to their meritocratic ideals. In his final chapter, Karabel decries the heavy advantage that those schools continue to accord legacy applicants and athletes, and he takes them to task for admissions policies that still decidedly favor the rich (the Big Three today, he charges, are actually less economically diverse than they were 40 years ago).</p>
<p>But like Young, Karabel is also deeply skeptical of meritocracy itself, calling it “seriously flawed as a governing societal ideal.” He emphasizes the unabashed elitism of such meritocrats as Conant and Brewster, men comfortable with vast inequality as long as it correlated with ability. Today, Karabel points out, two-thirds of Americans believe that “people have equal opportunities to get ahead,” and only 28 percent favor government action to reduce income inequality, whereas in England, those numbers are practically reversed.</p>
<p>Karabel's book, then, directs its quiet outrage toward fixing the faults of a system whose goals he only reluctantly shares; he closes <i>The Chosen</i> with an approving description of Young's ideas. Ultimately, it's hard to know which Karabel would prefer: a more finely discriminating admissions system or one that didn't discriminate at all. </p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a staff writer for the Ideas section of The Boston Globe.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:05:31 +0000144952 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettRight on the Low Roadhttp://prospect.org/article/right-low-road
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><b>The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to<br />
Get Ahead</b> By David Callahan • Harcourt • 353 pages • $26.00</p></blockquote>
<p>Few decisions caused George Washington more agony than whether or not to accept some canal-company shares that the Virginia General Assembly offered him in 1784. The gift was perfectly legal, and such signs of appreciation were commonplace in the early republic. Washington was a private citizen at the time (a somewhat cash-strapped one at that) and had always been a great champion of the canal system, but he couldn't abide the thought that his acceptance might be seen as a payoff. He debated for months, writing everyone from Jefferson to Lafayette for advice. In the end, he decided to bequeath the shares to the college that was to become Washington &amp; Lee. </p>
<p>Washington had what might be called an overdeveloped sense of virtue, and in that he has an heir in David Callahan, co-founder of the public-policy center Demos. Callahan's new book, <i>The Cheating Culture</i>, is a catalog of all the ways we fail to live up to the standards set not only by marbleized eminences like Washington but by generations of unremarkably honest Americans. Today, according to Callahan, we are lying about our taxes, padding our résumés, doping, embezzling, plagiarizing, and generally hornswoggling as never before. The cresting wave of corporate scandals and the journalistic betrayals of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass were only the most publicized cases in "an epidemic of cheating." Yet for all the perp walks, firings, fines, and suspensions, "[T]here's been very little effort to connect all these dots and see them for what they represent: a profound moral crisis that reflects deep economic and social problems in American society."</p>
<p>Despite his big-picture ambitions, Callahan's style tends toward the anecdotal. The bulk of the book is taken up with describing some of the more egregious scams of our day. Many in the rogue's gallery -- Blair, Jeffrey Skilling, Sammy Sosa, Henry Blodget -- are familiar from yesterday's headlines. Some are less so: Danny Altamonte, whose father and coach lied about his age so he could play in the Little League World Series, thousands of customers of New York's Municipal Credit Union, Ivy League-bound plagiarizers at New York's Horace Mann School, even Callahan's friend Max, who fudges his tax return.</p>
<p>In focusing on questions of character, Callahan, an unabashed liberal, is planting his flag in conservative cultural territory. But the Jeremiahs of the right have, by and large, not listed cheating alongside drug use, casual sex, and rap lyrics as a harbinger of the apocalypse. That's because, Callahan argues, it is conservatives who laid the groundwork for today's cheating culture. For one thing, their evangelical brand of free-market fundamentalism helped undermine traditional codes of professional ethics. Callahan describes how the Sears auto-repair chain, under pressure from investors in the late 1980s, instituted a new compensation system that cut employees' base salaries, forcing them to make up the difference in performance incentives. Mechanics and sales staff had to ensure that a certain number of repairs, necessary or not, were performed to make their quotas. Within a year, complaints of fraudulent billing and dishonesty had mushroomed.</p>
<p>To make things worse, economic success has taken on moral dimensions. Starting in the early 1980s, Callahan writes, "It became not all right in our society to express yourself by altering your consciousness with drugs or getting naked with strangers. But it was all right -- admired, in fact -- to express yourself with a Rolex, a Porsche, or a pedantic mastery of French wines." Getting rich in and of itself was God's work (no talk of a camel fitting through the eye of a needle there), and the details of how one got there began to seem trivial.</p>
<p>Paraphrasing the economist Robert Frank, Callahan describes ours as a "winner-take-all society," where more and more resources go to extravagantly rewarding star performers, whether CEOs or shortstops, leaving only table scraps for everybody else. And as the carrots get bigger, so do the sticks. Again, we have the disciples of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to thank; our increasingly threadbare social safety net makes the consequences of "losing" that much harsher. Egged on by societally sanctioned visions of pharaonic wealth and goaded by the specter of unassisted penury, it's no wonder that people are cheating more.</p>
<p>But are they? Blaming our new national Machiavellianism on the same conservatives who have done so much to make the personal political has a tempting, jujitsu-like elegance, and Callahan has the facts to support it -- up to a point. His case is strongest where it is most straightforward: He notes how the small-government philosophy ascendant over the past 20 years has emboldened cheaters everywhere by undermining the regulatory powers of the state. The correlation is especially striking at the Internal Revenue Service, where, as the agency has seen its funding shrivel, the amount of money lost to unpaid taxes has ballooned from $100 billion in 1990 to $250 billion in 2001 (some outside experts put it as high as $500 billion).</p>
<p>But these are particular cases of enforcement, not questions of culture. When Callahan tries to (as he puts it) connect the dots, to sketch out the whole ugly panorama, he gets ahead of his evidence. At times he admits as much: "While there is no hard evidence that misconduct in journalism has increased in recent years, there are plenty of reasons to think that journalists are facing new pressures on their integrity that stem from a greater focus on the bottom line and bigger pay disparities." If, of course, those new pressures are not leading to more misconduct (and, as recent cases have reminded us, cheating journalists are especially likely to leave hard evidence), Callahan's case remains speculative. Perhaps realizing this weakness in his argument, he sometimes verges on the downright evasive. He notes that "it seems that more doctors are breaking more rules and putting Americans at risk in the process," only to admit in an endnote that, again, "[T]here is little hard evidence of either an increase or decrease in conflicts of interest among doctors."</p>
<p>Cheating is as American as snake-oil salesmen: The American Revolution itself might not have happened if the colonists weren't such brazen tax dodgers (it was their great good fortune to be able to turn what had been routine evasion into an act of political defiance). Nor are declensionist plaints like Callahan's anything new. Within a few years of the Revolution, nearly all of the Founding Fathers were lamenting the unscrupulousness of the newly empowered polity. As even Washington realized, self-interest swept virtue before it: "The few, therefore, who act upon Principles of disinterestedness are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean."</p>
<p>Strangely enough, nowhere in <i>The Cheating Culture</i> does Callahan define cheating. The closest he comes is in the subtitle, where he seems to equate it with "doing wrong." The definition bears traces of what Richard Hofstadter once described as the "moral absolutism" that handicaps American reform movements. Though his training is in political science, Callahan, like the mugwumps of old, often sounds like a man of the cloth. His closing chapter, where he suggests how we might wean ourselves from our devious ways, opens as a grab bag of favorite progressive solutions -- some, like smart growth and affirmative action, only tenuously related to cheating -- and closes as a sermon. "Be the chump," he exhorts us, "who files an honest tax return." </p>
<p>George Washington would be proud, but even he knew better. Ours, after all, is a cheating culture. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 18 Jun 2004 06:29:20 +0000143573 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettOur Mongrel Planethttp://prospect.org/article/our-mongrel-planet
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p>
<b>Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures</b> By Tyler Cowen, Princeton University Press, 179 pages, $27.95
</p></blockquote>
<p>In a short story by the late William Maxwell, an American named John Reynolds takes his family to Le Mont-Saint-Michel 18 years after his magical first visit. Their hotel is bland, the food mediocre and they are swept along in thick throngs of harried tourists. Worst of all, the walled gardens that Reynolds remembers as visions "from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours" have been plowed under so that the souvenir shops can expand. Disconsolate, Reynolds thinks to himself:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Once in a while, some small detail represented an improvement on the past, and you could not be happy in the intellectual climate of any time but your own. But in general, so far as the way people lived, it was one loss after another, something hideous replacing something beautiful, the decay of manners, the lapse of pleasant customs, as by a blind increase in numbers the human race went about making the earth more and more unfit to live on.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Maxwell, it sometimes seems, is one of the few writers Tyler Cowen does not mention in his gluttonously omnivorous works on culture and commerce. But there is no better encapsulation of what Cowen calls the "cultural pessimist" than Maxwell's John Reynolds, who, at least, has illustrious company: Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Pope, Swift, Hazlitt, Tocqueville, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Theodor Adorno, Bloom (Allan and Harold) and Catherine MacKinnon all qualify, in Cowen's estimation, as gloom-and-doomers. Cowen, on the other hand, is a cultural optimist, and of the sort that one can only be if one grew up, as Cowen did, with a father who ran the local chamber of commerce.</p>
<p>
Cowen has made his name as a professional booster for the benefits that the market brings to the arts. An economist at George Mason University and a libertarian, he first staked out his position in 1998 with <i>In Praise of Commercial Culture</i>, arguing that much of our artistic heritage, both high and low, is due to the invisible hand -- whether that meant the wealth of Florence or the greed of Beethoven. Cowen maintains that, far from reducing everything to bland mass-culture pap, the market ensures a diverse menu of artistic goods. Book superstores, the enemy of literary declensionists, carry a much wider variety than the corner shops they supplant, and best-sellers account for only 3 percent of their sales. Nor, he argues, does today's diversity necessarily crowd out older art forms. "[F]rom 1965 to 1990," he writes, "America grew from having 58 symphony orchestras to having nearly 300, from 27 opera companies to more than 150, and from 22 non-profit regional theaters to 500."</p>
<p>
Cowen's latest book, <i>Creative Destruction</i>, continues in the same vein. In it, he counters those -- from the American political scientist Benjamin Barber to the French farmer-activist José Bové -- who charge globalization with smothering the world's diversity of cultures under a blanket of kitsch, sensationalism and cheeseburgers. But his tone has changed a bit in the intervening years. The neutrality of the new work's title (borrowed from the economist Joseph Schumpeter) is intentional: Cowen has not only narrowed his focus; he has also reined in his inner Pangloss and, despite the occasional elision and the seeming philistinism of his arguments, makes his case about as well as one can. Globalization, it is clear, is not going to destroy the world's cultures. The question remains, though, whether that is what we should be worried about in the first place.</p>
<p>
Cowen's argument is twofold. First of all, the national cultures ostensibly threatened by globalization are themselves hybrids, created by interactions both ancient and modern. Cowen delights in showing the braided influences behind so-called indigenous art forms. Caucasian carpets drew on Persian and Chinese designs (and later Moscow chintz), and, in turn, influenced Sioux beadwork. Navajo weaving mimicked Spanish patterns, which themselves carried the mark of Moorish decorative art. </p>
<p>
When Paul Simon incorporated South African <i>mbaqanga</i> music into his <i>Graceland</i> album, critics accused him of cultural imperialism, but <i>mbaqanga</i> was itself largely an amalgam of Western spirituals, jazz, rock 'n' roll and even minstrel music -- so much so that many South Africans scorned <i>mbaqanga</i> as derivative. As Cowen writes, Simon was drawn to it "precisely because it shared so many sources with his own synthesis of the Western pop tradition."</p>
<p>
Cowen's second argument flows from his first: If cultural exchange helped create the diversity of cultures we have today, it can't be simply a homogenizing force. Although globalization tends to decrease diversity between cultures, it increases diversity within cultures. It is now possible to get foie gras in the United States and le Big Mac in France. In that sense, the two countries are more similar and the world is more uniform. But each society now offers a more diverse set of choices, a diversity that both countries' inhabitants can more easily take advantage of. This dialectic shapes Cowen's portrait of globalization: A global culture is created, piece by piece, but it grows more variegated and complex along the way. And, even as geographically based identities blur and fade, new subcultures, based on shared tastes in music or literature or obscure hobbies, grow up.</p>
<p>
One reviewer to take issue with Cowen's rosy view of globalization was, unsurprisingly, Benjamin Barber. Economists such as Cowen, Barber wrote, "treat exchange within the mythic frame of perfect market freedom, where it is the result of two equally free, equally voluntary, equally powerful contractees who sit down as gentlemen and make a deal." That is not, Barber argued, how things actually happen. "Once the relative power of the intersecting cultures is factored in," he writes, " ... the happy reciprocity of cultural hybridization is trumped by the unhappy preeminence of the dominant culture."</p>
<p>
But, as Cowen sees it, dominance is no simple thing. Global culture remains a stubbornly mongrel creation. For all its success with its movies, the United States has been unable to do nearly as well exporting its TV programs. And despite the best efforts of McDonald's, the most popular fast food in England remains curry. Even where American chains thrive, indigenous cuisine doesn't simply die away: Paris and Hong Kong, two gastronomic meccas, boast the world's busiest Pizza Huts. Cowen might also have mentioned Coca-Cola's recent struggles to adapt in an increasingly diversified and discriminating world beverage market, or Euro Disney, which was a flop until it introduced rides based on French movies and started serving wine. </p>
<p>
Of course, there is always a loss with such exchanges, and Cowen admits as much. Certain things will get plowed under for the souvenir shops and megaplexes, and though Cowen is certain that what replaces them will be just as beautiful and multifarious, this loss dents even his indefatigable optimism. Perhaps a little provincialism, he concedes, is a healthy thing. </p>
<p>
Which brings us to the question of whether this is the right debate to be having in the first place. To argue over culture with Cowen is to debate the look and feel of globalization instead of its substance. It is also highly irresponsible because the true weaknesses of Cowen's laissez-faire libertarianism become clear only beyond the realms of crafts and cuisine. After all, cultures, unlike people, don't suffer; they only change. Culture is simply human beings reacting to and making sense of the world around them. It is literally an inexhaustible resource. In that, it is perfectly -- and uniquely -- suited to Cowen's worldview. </p>
<p>
Someone more concerned about human welfare than about culture might have a different view of the global market. To speak of global trade's impact on health and well-being is much more complicated and ambiguous, and it might tax even Cowen's powers of blithe rationalization. Above all, it would put questions of cultural gains and losses in perspective. Perhaps the best example of the disparate stakes is provided by Cowen himself in his first book, where he writes that the African slave trade "revolutionized world music. ... Most contemporary popular musical forms -- blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, jazz, swing, bebop, boogie, ragtime, calypso, samba, forro, son, ska, reggae, salsa, meringue, plena, and rap -- were created by Africans in the New World or were derived from African influence." A diversity of styles, to be sure, but hardly a fair exchange. The artistic creativity of slaves and former slaves can never justify or compensate for their loss of freedom. Even a libertarian would acknowledge that.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:16:09 +0000143198 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettCrime and Redemptionhttp://prospect.org/article/crime-and-redemption
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Because the Texas legislature is in session a mere five months out of the year, serving as a Lone Star state representative is not the most time-consuming of jobs. It's hardly unusual, therefore, that Ray Allen, the Republican chairman of the House Corrections Committee, has a couple of careers on the side. When he's not serving the good people of Dallas County, Allen runs the Academy for Firearms Training, where Texans who want to apply for a concealed-carry handgun permit can go and receive the required instruction. He also, along with his chief of staff, heads a company called Service House Inc., whose sole client is the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA). On the NCIA's dime, Allen lobbies Congress, the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Office of Management and Budget on the virtues of prison privatization. Oddly enough, this is actually legal.</p>
<p>
All of which suggests that Ray Allen may not be the legislator one would expect to have written a law mandating that first-time low-level drug offenders get treatment instead of prison time. Nor would one expect that in Texas -- a state that carries out one-third of the executions performed in this country and has a museum dedicated to its prison system -- both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature would pass Allen's bill unanimously, or that the Republican governor would sign it into law. But in June, that's exactly what happened. As Allen put it to the <i>San Antonio Express-News</i>, "This is the first time I've agreed with liberal Democrats on anything."</p>
<p>
One might also suspect that if such tender mercies are prevailing in Texas, there must be some sort of national trend, and in that one would be correct. Texas is far from alone in its reconsideration of the criminal-justice policies of the past 20-odd years. Last year, on Christmas Day, Michigan's outgoing governor, John Engler, signed three bills repealing the state's mandatory minimum drug laws, which had been the most punitive in the nation. Colorado has given judges discretion to put drug offenders on probation instead of sending them to prison, and states like Missouri and Delaware have reduced the sentences for drug offenses and low-level felonies. Arizona and Washington are channeling their savings in incarceration costs from reduced drug-offender sentences into treatment programs. Kansas is doing the same, except it's actually taking the money, $6.6 million, out of state general funds. Indiana has created a "forensic diversion" program that allows judges to send nonviolent offenders to treatment programs if mental illness or substance abuse is determined to have contributed to the crime. And in what could prove the most ambitious reform, Connecticut's legislature is debating a bill that would divert probation and parole violators away from prisons while investing the savings in infrastructure programs for neighborhoods with the highest crime rates.</p>
<p>
Why the change of heart? It's not that "lock-'em-up" types have suddenly turned into kindhearted liberals. Rather, the state fiscal crisis has put an end to the prison boom. As this special section of <i>The American Prospect</i> recounts, the straits of the states have created some strange bedfellows -- and some rare opportunities. Reformers have termed the concept "justice reinvestment." A dollar diverted from prison construction, or from the expense of housing inmates serving ever-longer sentences, can actually bring about a net reduction in crime. Why? Because other approaches are not only much less expensive than incarceration; dollar for dollar, they actually work better.</p>
<p>
In theory, society could reduce crime by locking up every first-time offender for life. But even the hardest of the hard-liners knows this approach is neither just nor fiscally possible. So strategies long commended by reformers are getting a second look. </p>
<p>
On the front end, these approaches include diversion efforts into drug treatment, restitution and a promising concept that goes far beyond "community service," known as "compensatory justice," in which youthful offenders become part of a community process that includes the victims, and often neighbors, as well as their own families. David Reed, a Chicago-based expert on compensatory justice, tells of a young vandal arrested for throwing a rock through the window of a truck belonging to a construction contractor. The furious contractor reluctantly agreed to become part of the community-mediation process, under the Community Panels for Youth program organized by Northwestern University's Children and Family Justice Center. Eventually, the contractor hired the young offender, who, as far as we know, never committed another crime. All such programs may not have such storybook endings. But for young first-time offenders, they often promise better results than prison. Compensatory justice, an approach as old as the dispute-resolution systems of tribal and traditional societies, has new support from criminal-justice professionals and courts.</p>
<p>
Post-incarceration, the new approach uses much more intensive programs to re-integrate ex-offenders into society. At the broadest level, the savings of criminal-justice dollars can be reprogrammed into other social investments -- in education and job training -- that give at-risk individuals a reason to pursue lives that do not include crime. Many conservatives, with their strong beliefs in the power of economic incentives, have become part of this reform coalition.</p>
<p>
Standing against this wave of reforms, however, is one conspicuous holdout: the federal government. In September, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered that, almost without exception, federal prosecutors were to go for the maximum sentence in all cases. Shortly prior, he had announced that he promised to keep tabs on any judges who hand down sentences lighter than those specified in the federal sentencing guidelines. But, as tempting a target as John Ashcroft always is, the recent federal get-tough impulse isn't just his doing. The tracking of lenient judges, for one, wasn't his idea; rather, it was mandated by an amendment tacked on to the Protect Act of 2003 (the bill creating the Amber Plan) by Florida congressional Republican Tom Feeney. Ditto for the demand that the U.S. Sentencing Commission revise its guidelines to limit judges' sentencing discretion. In other words, the Republican majority in Congress is at least an equal partner in Ashcroft's current campaign.</p>
<p>
The split between state and federal policy has not gone unnoticed. In late September, a <i>New York Times</i> article addressed the nation's "somewhat contradictory national crime-fighting agenda." But how will these two divergent strategies affect each other? Will the federal government stamp out what may be the only positive legacy of the current state budget mess? It's hard to tell for sure, but many of the changes at the state level look more like durable policies than temporary fixes, and many of the officials who have implemented them express a stubborn resistance to the idea of letting themselves get led down the path toward yesterday's punitive policies. </p>
<p>
However, the federal government can buck the states' trend because, quite simply, it doesn't have to play by the same rules. And federal revenues and mandates still constrain what states may do in their own criminal-justice reforms. Meanwhile, many reforms will fail, if they are done on the cheap, in the context of dire budget emergencies. It is cheaper -- and more cost-effective -- to run a good re-entry program than to keep an inmate incarcerated. But it is cheaper still to run no re-entry program at all, even though the real social costs are higher.</p>
<p>
At roughly $25,000 per year per inmate, incarceration is expensive -- much more expensive than, say, drug treatment or "community corrections" alternatives like halfway houses or parole supervision. But as Michael Lawlor, a Democratic Connecticut state representative and co-chairman of the Connecticut General Assembly's Judiciary Committee, points out, "The federal government has a couple of luxuries: It can print money and it can pick the cases it wants. The states have to try everyone the cops arrest. At some point, [the federal government] will probably be overwhelmed and will have to rethink [its] policy." But, as he admits, that's not likely to happen very soon. Unlike nearly every state, the federal government doesn't have to balance its budget, and appropriations for the Federal Bureau of Prisons are a sliver compared with, say, Social Security or the military. In states, on the other hand, corrections usually ranks as a big-ticket item, just below health insurance and education. </p>
<p>
State officials don't pretend that they're motivated by a newfound concern for the plight of the incarcerated. As a spokesman for Nebraska state Sen. and Judiciary Committee Chairman Kermit Brashear bluntly put it, "All this is absolutely due to the state fiscal crunch." James Austin, a criminologist at George Washington University's Institute on Crime, Justice and Corrections, sees things similarly. "I don't think there was much concern about this until the money started to be a problem for [the states]," he says. "There were a few little blips, I guess ... but it's always been a money issue more than an issue of, 'Are we doing the right thing for society?'" Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the measures that states are exploring are administrative, and for every progressive parole policy there are several proposals along the lines of staff layoffs and farming inmates out to other states' systems. In many states, treatment programs are getting cut along with prison budgets, and in a few (including aforementioned states like Arizona and Texas), inmates are even being fed less.</p>
<p>
The strictly fiscal explanation suggests that there's a very straightforward relationship between federal and state policy. In the words of New York City-based criminal-justice policy analyst Judy Green, it's "money, money, money, money." As she points out, "The drug war has been greatly fueled by federal initiatives that have provided states with money, and there are other initiatives that have affected state policy outside the drug issue." Perhaps the best-known example is the 1994 Crime Bill, which, among other measures, made $8 billion available to the states for prison construction -- but only if they adopted strict "truth-in-sentencing" requirements, namely more draconian sentences.</p>
<p>
So the federal money has been a mixed blessing. The Crime Bill didn't, for example, give states any money to run the prisons they built. The result is what Daniel F. Wilhelm, director of the state sentencing and corrections program at the Manhattan-based Vera Institute of Justice, calls "the hangover effect of the money they got the last time around. You hear state legislators saying, 'We forgot that these facilities cost a lot to run, too.' So now you have prisons that are empty, are being mothballed." But closing them down is tricky, as prison-guard unions and -- in a sort of reverse NIMBY-ism -- surrounding communities that see the prisons as sources of income are unafraid to make their displeasure heard.</p>
<p>
For years criminologists and economists have been pointing out the enormous costs of our hard-time policies. The authors of one RAND Corporation study looked at mandatory minimum sentences for cocaine-related crimes and calculated that focusing on treatment would reduce serious crimes "on the order of 15 times as much as the incarceration alternatives" per million dollars spent. And earlier this year, Steve Aos, of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, released a widely discussed report concluding that taxpayers now spend more to incarcerate drug offenders than the value of the crimes that the incarceration prevents. </p>
<p>
And indeed, those states that have moved toward less punitive sentencing have seen savings. In California -- where the passage three years ago of Proposition 36 was a harbinger of the popularity of treatment programs instead of incarceration for low-level drug crimes -- state officials estimate that they'll cut their prison population by nearly a quarter and save $250 million over the next three or four years. Texas looks to save an estimated $30 million over five years. Washington Department of Corrections Secretary Joseph Lehman estimates the changes in his state have saved $43 million in the current biennial budget, and, while Michigan officials have been stingy with their numbers, the <i>Detroit Free Press</i> estimates that the state will save $41 million this year alone. </p>
<p>
It's no wonder that right now, in Wilhelm's words, the federal system, with its maximalist ethos, "stands as this lighthouse of what not to do. Everyone in the states agrees that they hate it." And in the end, while the current reconsideration is partly fiscal, it's more than that, too. As Reginald Wilkinson, director of Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, puts it, "We're not looking to the [Justice Department] to bail us out of this problem -- which they aren't going to do -- and we're not going to them for advice." For the average nonviolent drug offender, that's probably a good thing. After all, 94 percent of felonies are adjudicated in state courts, and 90 percent of felons are held in local or state prisons.</p>
<p>
The fact is, as Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project puts it, the federal government is "very much out there even for mainstream people in the field. If you go to a conference and talk to corrections people and prosecutors, there are very few voices out there advocating dramatically stepped-up punishment policy. If the point is to get tough, we've already gotten very tough over the past several years." With crime rates down and polls showing voters less concerned with the issue, politicians are slightly less paranoid about getting the Willie Horton treatment. Lawlor, the Connecticut state representative, sees the states' sentencing reconsideration as "two parts fiscal crisis, one part criminal-justice policy. It's happening at the same time as there are a lot more people with a lot more enlightened view of criminal justice." In Lehman's view, "Budget policies become a lever, they force people to ask the question of whether we're spending our money right, and I think that's healthy." Former Michigan Gov. William G. Milliken, who signed the state's mandatory minimum sentences into law in 1978 and has spent the past six years campaigning against them, goes further. "I think, or I'd like to think, that not only are fiscal considerations affecting willingness of change, that there's also a sense of fairness of what is right and what is just, and a recognition that what we've done in the past isn't working," he says.</p>
<p>
In this respect, the Ashcroft approach represents ideology overpowering facts on the ground. The states offer a potent counterweight. A generation ago, in the era of New York's Rockefeller laws and as recently as California's three-strikes law, the states were hard-liners and Washington was somewhat more enlightened. It is a double irony for an administration that professes to believe in federalism that supposedly conservative states driven by fiscal crisis are pursuing more progressive and effective policies that Washington opposes.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 20 Nov 2003 21:38:02 +0000143142 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettHead Caseshttp://prospect.org/article/head-cases
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Throughout American history, the Senate -- where small and conservative states have disproportionate weight and where rules allow one senator to block key legislation -- has far more often been a force for reaction than for progress. But these are unusual times, and with an ideologically rigid administration and scores of zealots in the House, it's often fallen to the Senate to bring sanity to the legislative process. The latest case in point is the Head Start debate, which shows just how extreme the White House and the House of Representatives really are -- and exposes the increasingly glaring fissures within the GOP over the administration's extremism.</p>
<p>
The debate over Head Start reauthorization is usually the legislative equivalent of a wedding rehearsal dinner. Legislators from both sides of the aisle rise to extol the early-childhood program's virtues and speed it on its way to a lopsided vote of approval. Of all the components of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Head Start has proven the most universally accepted. Even Ronald Reagan increased Head Start's funding while making deep cuts in other children's services. George Bush Senior gave the program the biggest funding increase in its history, only to be outdone a few years later by Bill Clinton.</p>
<p>
But if there's one thing that defines our current President Bush, it's an impressive ignorance of history. Head Start is the latest federal program to find itself at the receiving end of Bush's "if it ain't broke, break it" policy. A House bill modeled on the Bush administration's Head Start proposal threatens some of the core provisions of the program, handing control over to cash-starved states without mandating that they maintain the program's high standards. During the rancorous House debate, critics like Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, accused the administration of trying to "annihilate an entire program."</p>
<p>
Things have gone differently in the Senate. Liberal stalwarts like Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) have blasted the bill, but key Republican senators have also sought to distance themselves from it, meaning that whatever emerges from the Senate later this month is likely to look much more Head Start-friendly than the House bill. Given the Bush administration's fierce response to dissent, one might wonder why senior Republican senators (and some moderate Republicans in the House) aren't falling into line -- until one looks at what they'd have to sign on to, that is.</p>
<p>
Head Start began in 1965 as an eight-week summer program, designed by a panel of child-development experts to help meet the needs of the nation's disadvantaged preschool children. Southern governors balked at the prospect of a program that would give so much of its benefits to poor blacks, so President Johnson bypassed the states, sending the funding directly to the local level, a distinctive arrangement that remains to this day. Head Start children are taught reading, language and math skills, plus get their immunization shots, have their teeth checked, are screened for disabilities and are regularly fed. The comprehensive care has also included parents of Head Start children, who are encouraged to participate in the program either as volunteers or members of Parent Committees or Policy Councils. Nearly a third of Head Start employees are former or current Head Start parents.</p>
<p>
Head Start kids enter kindergarten far better prepared than they would have been otherwise. A recent study by the Department of Health and Human Services shows Head Start giving its graduates a decided edge in vocabulary and writing skills over other disadvantaged children. In 1999, Head Start finished at the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (an independent measure of consumer attitudes toward everything from government agencies to Fortune 500 companies), beating out not only every other federal agency but also private companies like Mercedes-Benz and BMW. And in a study whose preliminary results were released earlier this year, John Meier, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tracked more than 600 Head Start graduates from the San Bernardino area. His findings showed improved scores in reading, language and math. Adding up other factors like the increased earnings, decreased welfare dependence and reduced grade repetition of Head Start graduates, he also calculated that San Bernardino County saved $8.74 for every dollar spent on the program. </p>
<p>
Bush, however, has chosen to ignore this record and focus instead on the program's alleged shortcoming: that Head Start graduates are not as well prepared for kindergarten as their better-off peers. So the administration proposed turning the program over to the states, a move that most certainly would have weakened it. While that proposal didn't make it into the House's version (thanks to stiff resistance from the program's grass-roots supporters), the bill does provide for a watered-down version in the form of an eight-state pilot program. It also carries another Bush stamp: In a feature familiar to those who have followed the etiolating of Bush's No Child Left Behind education act, the Head Start bill creates a new mandate -- that half of Head Start teachers must have bachelor's degrees by 2008 -- without providing any new money for it. The funding increase the bill does mandate is barely enough to keep pace with inflation, and nowhere near enough to attract college graduates who could make nearly twice as much working in a public school than at Head Start.</p>
<p>
The bill also carries that other Bush hallmark: flexibility. In the House version's pilot program, the eight participating states would be able to use Head Start money to supplant federal funding they get for other child-care programs. In effect the states would be cutting their overall child-care spending to free up money to, say, plug one of their yawning budget gaps. Most strikingly, the bill does not require states that opt for the pilot program to keep Head Start's strict standards on everything from staff qualifications and child-staff ratios to children's nutrition, health and safety. And, as Sarah M. Greene, president and CEO of the National Head Start Association, points out, "Most states that have any form of pre-kindergarten have very weak standards in comparison to Head Start's." Defenders note that the bill does suggest that states adhere to those standards. But it's hard to place much stock in that seeing as those same defenders dismiss many of the standards as "hundreds of pages of needless regulations," as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) wrote in a June press release. </p>
<p>
Given that few states have shown any interest in taking on a whole new social-services bureaucracy at this time -- indeed, Rep. Ron Lewis (R-Ky.) justified his vote for the bill to his constituents by promising that his state wouldn't participate in the pilot program -- and that every one is now radically scaling back social services in the face of near-record budget shortfalls, the House bill could be nothing but unpopular. The more consensus-minded Republicans in the Senate realized that such a divisive proposition didn't have a prayer of passage. In response, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) proposed his own plan. It centered around giving bonus funding to 200 Head Start "Centers of Excellence" nationwide, gestured toward more state control but generally kept the program's administrative structure as is. When asked what Alexander thinks of the House bill, Alexia Poe, his press secretary, diplomatically demurred, "He likes his bill better. ... He hopes that his bill is a way to address more state involvement without giving the money directly to the states." </p>
<p>
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who as chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has presided over the Senate bill markup, has been similarly coy about his position on the House bill. He hasn't criticized it, but he hasn't endorsed its key provisions, either. What he has done, over and over, in public and -- according to Kennedy spokesman Jim Manley -- privately, is state his desire for a truly bipartisan bill. And that's not what the House had to offer. In Manley's words, "Sen. Gregg has already conceded that the block grants are a nonstarter." </p>
<p>
So the true Republican partisans in the House and White House will likely be disappointed by the Senate bill. The rest of us, however, may see a bit of hope, however, not only in the prospects for Head Start but in the weakening of the White House's iron grip.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:11:41 +0000143108 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettThe Nixon Enigmahttp://prospect.org/article/nixon-enigma
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>No matter what we do, those of us in our 20s can't seem to measure up to the Greatest Generation. That bygone nation of joiners, providers and world-beaters, in the standard story, puts to shame today's sad assemblage of narcissists and whiners. Gone are the days when the United States, stung by a Japanese sneak attack, rose up to shrug off the Great Depression and cohere into a fighting force of Riveting Rosies and Private Ryans. Political scientist Robert Putnam called our grandparents "the long civic generation."</p>
<p>
Of course, the September 11 attacks did arouse a general sense of solidarity and national duty. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, there were, for example, three times as many volunteers for the national service program AmeriCorps as available slots. And despite the conventional wisdom that America's young are less civically engaged than their parents and grandparents, the reality is that young America is awash in community service. High-school and college community-service activities have never been more extensive. Many would build on this trend and dramatically expand existing service opportunities; some would even make a stint doing national service mandatory. </p>
<p>
It's a venerable idea. For its supporters, national service does triple duty, shaping productive, selfless citizens and filling unmet social needs while creating a shared sense of national identity. As William James bracingly put it in a 1910 essay, "To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." </p>
<p>
President Bush himself has caught the national service bug. In his 2002 State of the Union address, he proposed expanding AmeriCorps by 50 percent, adding nearly $300 million to national service spending and creating spots for 2 million Americans in the country's national service programs by some unspecified date. Characteristically, there has been no follow-up. In fact, the House of Representatives voted down an emergency $100 million infusion for cash-strapped AmeriCorps. As the memoirist-turned-service-advocate Dave Eggers wrote in a heartbroken <i>New York Times</i> op-ed, "Congress and the White House have turned their backs on these volunteers."</p>
<p>
But the zeal of national service proponents is undimmed. The war on terrorism and its massive security needs, they argue, demand manpower of the sort that only a domestic army of community servants can supply. And the sense of threat has added urgency to discussions of national identity and solidarity, both issues that national service promises to address. The terrorist attacks only brought into relief a trend that has been accelerating for several years: In a growing number of states and school districts, community service is a requirement for high-school graduation, and "service learning" is the pedagogy of the day.</p>
<p>
As a veteran of City Year -- the community-service organization upon which then-President Bill Clinton based AmeriCorps -- and one who counts my year of service a formative and productive one, I'm not sure that this epidemic of volunteerism is entirely a welcome trend. For starters, compulsory volunteering is a contradiction in terms. Also, systemic government solutions rather than piecemeal acts of goodwill better address many of the problems that volunteers tackle. If hospitals and libraries increasingly rely on volunteers, it's because reduced federal appropriations are starving institutions that depend on public funding. In this context, well-intentioned young people who fill the gap are enablers of the attack on public services.</p>
<p>
Moreover, much of what's done by volunteers has a tacit politics that volunteerism may inadvertently conceal. If you volunteer in a soup kitchen or help the homeless, you should also be working to eliminate the causes of homelessness. That enterprise, of course, logically leads to social change and to politics as the necessary instrument of change. But many volunteer organizations, either because of their tax status, their funding sources or their necessary nonpartisanship, take great pains to eschew politics. A few years ago, when students affiliated with Phillips Brooks House, Harvard University's pre-eminent community-service institution for undergraduates, came out in support of the school's "living wage" campaign, they earned a rebuke from the university's new president, Lawrence Summers, for taking what he judged to be an overly partisan stand.</p>
<p>
Local service projects -- George Bush Senior's "thousand points of light" -- fragment political energy. Yale Law School professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, in their 1999 book, <i>The Stakeholder Society</i>, take contemporary liberals to task for their unwillingness to tackle the enormous and central problem of wealth inequality in favor of "a thousand lesser policies." Universal service seems to be a pretty good example of just that. Unlike conservatives, modern liberals are unafraid to use the government to take care of what the market can or will not. But to rely on an army of young amateurs to deal with societal needs seems a strangely indirect way to go about it. If inner-city schools are struggling, isn't the solution to give them more money for their infrastructures and teacher salaries instead of spending the money on an at best lightly trained conscript? </p>
<p>
In addition, employers in both the public and private sectors, gifted with a national service corps of nearly 4 million, would be sorely tempted to use this pool of cheap, captive labor to phase out salaried (and benefited) employees. As Service Employees International Union lobbyist Skip Roberts dryly notes, "That might be the only reason why it might appeal to anyone in the White House."</p>
<p>
But what of the character-building aspect of it? It's undeniable that some young people would have their first taste of service in such a program. However, with a vast majority of high schools participating in community service (83 percent, according to a 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Education), most students have already been exposed to the concept. And so far, research has failed to link even voluntary service with increased civic engagement. A recent study by the National Association of Secretaries of State found that youth who performed service were no more likely to be involved in politics than their nonvolunteering peers. The fact is, Americans between the ages of 15 and 25 already volunteer more than any other age group; but they also vote far less (and the number of voters continues to shrink). According to a 2002 study released by the University of Maryland's Center for Information &amp; Research on Civic Learning &amp; Engagement (CIRCLE), young Americans are also less likely than their (admittedly also pretty disengaged) elders to have participated in traditional forms of civic engagement -- writing a letter to their congressman or newspaper, for example, or marching in a demonstration or volunteering for a political campaign. </p>
<p>
When asked about this, the apolitical young respond that politics is, in effect, useless. Thomas Ehrlich is a former board member of the Corporation for National Service and a current scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching and Learning who studies civic engagement and service learning. He has found that "one of the reasons kids give [for their apolitical tendencies] is that they don't see a chance to make a difference. They can tutor a kid in school, clean up a park, serve in a community kitchen and feel that they're making a difference. But trying to change the political process in their community, much less the country -- they don't see that happening." </p>
<p>
Tellingly, the CIRCLE study found that the civic activities young people preferred were individual or nongovernmental: buying a certain brand because they agreed with its values, for example, or donating to a charity. After all, as Michael Delli Carpini, a scholar of civic life and the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, has noted, "Civic engagement has become <i>defined</i> as the one-on-one experience of working in a soup kitchen, clearing trash from a local river or tutoring a child once a week. What is missing is an awareness of the connection between the individual, isolated problems these actions are intended to address and the larger world of public policy." To enshrine what is in effect institutionalized volunteerism in a federal program could very well end up merely reinforcing the idea that acts of kindness, random or not, rather than governmental action, are the solution to society's ills. </p>
<p>
And that is the central paradox of national service: It is big government for people who don't like big government -- the counterpart of government support for local "faith- based" social services, or for traditional marriage as the cure for poverty. The current national service debate is really a holdover from the Clinton administration. </p>
<p>
While liberals are rightly ambivalent about national service, it has gained supporters among self-styled "national greatness" conservatives, thinkers like William Kristol and David Brooks who are concerned with restoring America's sense of purpose and grandeur. For them, government is meant not so much to govern, or even to solve social ills, but to inspire and provide its citizens with a Teddy Roosevelt-like sense of resolve and destiny. Brooks, for example, has argued that what the federal government needs to focus on is building grand monuments and institutions like the Library of Congress. </p>
<p>
Universal service would surely be an institution, and it would provide lots of people with a sense of purpose. But surely that's setting the bar pretty low for a federal program. As Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s, America has always had a rich social fabric of voluntary institutions. The point of government is not to keep its citizens busy living lives of vigorous action but to do what markets cannot. Yet active government requires an activist public agenda, which in turn depends on activated voters. If there's a paucity of civic engagement among the young, it is less in the area of volunteering than in taking seriously the enterprise of citizenship.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 17 Sep 2003 16:40:34 +0000143102 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettDoing Disservicehttp://prospect.org/article/doing-disservice
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>No matter what we do, those of us in our 20s can't seem to measure up to the Greatest Generation. That bygone nation of joiners, providers and world-beaters, in the standard story, puts to shame today's sad assemblage of narcissists and whiners. Gone are the days when the United States, stung by a Japanese sneak attack, rose up to shrug off the Great Depression and cohere into a fighting force of Riveting Rosies and Private Ryans. Political scientist Robert Putnam called our grandparents "the long civic generation."</p>
<p>
Of course, the September 11 attacks did arouse a general sense of solidarity and national duty. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, there were, for example, three times as many volunteers for the national service program AmeriCorps as available slots. And despite the conventional wisdom that America's young are less civically engaged than their parents and grandparents, the reality is that young America is awash in community service. High-school and college community-service activities have never been more extensive. Many would build on this trend and dramatically expand existing service opportunities; some would even make a stint doing national service mandatory. </p>
<p>
It's a venerable idea. For its supporters, national service does triple duty, shaping productive, selfless citizens and filling unmet social needs while creating a shared sense of national identity. As William James bracingly put it in a 1910 essay, "To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." </p>
<p>
President Bush himself has caught the national service bug. In his 2002 State of the Union address, he proposed expanding AmeriCorps by 50 percent, adding nearly $300 million to national service spending and creating spots for 2 million Americans in the country's national service programs by some unspecified date. Characteristically, there has been no follow-up. In fact, the House of Representatives voted down an emergency $100 million infusion for cash-strapped AmeriCorps. As the memoirist-turned-service-advocate Dave Eggers wrote in a heartbroken <i>New York Times</i> op-ed, "Congress and the White House have turned their backs on these volunteers."</p>
<p>
But the zeal of national service proponents is undimmed. The war on terrorism and its massive security needs, they argue, demand manpower of the sort that only a domestic army of community servants can supply. And the sense of threat has added urgency to discussions of national identity and solidarity, both issues that national service promises to address. The terrorist attacks only brought into relief a trend that has been accelerating for several years: In a growing number of states and school districts, community service is a requirement for high-school graduation, and "service learning" is the pedagogy of the day.</p>
<p>
As a veteran of City Year -- the community-service organization upon which then-President Bill Clinton based AmeriCorps -- and one who counts my year of service a formative and productive one, I'm not sure that this epidemic of volunteerism is entirely a welcome trend. For starters, compulsory volunteering is a contradiction in terms. Also, systemic government solutions rather than piecemeal acts of goodwill better address many of the problems that volunteers tackle. If hospitals and libraries increasingly rely on volunteers, it's because reduced federal appropriations are starving institutions that depend on public funding. In this context, well-intentioned young people who fill the gap are enablers of the attack on public services.</p>
<p>
Moreover, much of what's done by volunteers has a tacit politics that volunteerism may inadvertently conceal. If you volunteer in a soup kitchen or help the homeless, you should also be working to eliminate the causes of homelessness. That enterprise, of course, logically leads to social change and to politics as the necessary instrument of change. But many volunteer organizations, either because of their tax status, their funding sources or their necessary nonpartisanship, take great pains to eschew politics. A few years ago, when students affiliated with Phillips Brooks House, Harvard University's pre-eminent community-service institution for undergraduates, came out in support of the school's "living wage" campaign, they earned a rebuke from the university's new president, Lawrence Summers, for taking what he judged to be an overly partisan stand.</p>
<p>
Local service projects -- George Bush Senior's "thousand points of light" -- fragment political energy. Yale Law School professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, in their 1999 book, <i>The Stakeholder Society</i>, take contemporary liberals to task for their unwillingness to tackle the enormous and central problem of wealth inequality in favor of "a thousand lesser policies." Universal service seems to be a pretty good example of just that. Unlike conservatives, modern liberals are unafraid to use the government to take care of what the market can or will not. But to rely on an army of young amateurs to deal with societal needs seems a strangely indirect way to go about it. If inner-city schools are struggling, isn't the solution to give them more money for their infrastructures and teacher salaries instead of spending the money on an at best lightly trained conscript? </p>
<p>
In addition, employers in both the public and private sectors, gifted with a national service corps of nearly 4 million, would be sorely tempted to use this pool of cheap, captive labor to phase out salaried (and benefited) employees. As Service Employees International Union lobbyist Skip Roberts dryly notes, "That might be the only reason why it might appeal to anyone in the White House."</p>
<p>
But what of the character-building aspect of it? It's undeniable that some young people would have their first taste of service in such a program. However, with a vast majority of high schools participating in community service (83 percent, according to a 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Education), most students have already been exposed to the concept. And so far, research has failed to link even voluntary service with increased civic engagement. A recent study by the National Association of Secretaries of State found that youth who performed service were no more likely to be involved in politics than their nonvolunteering peers. The fact is, Americans between the ages of 15 and 25 already volunteer more than any other age group; but they also vote far less (and the number of voters continues to shrink). According to a 2002 study released by the University of Maryland's Center for Information &amp; Research on Civic Learning &amp; Engagement (CIRCLE), young Americans are also less likely than their (admittedly also pretty disengaged) elders to have participated in traditional forms of civic engagement -- writing a letter to their congressman or newspaper, for example, or marching in a demonstration or volunteering for a political campaign. </p>
<p>
When asked about this, the apolitical young respond that politics is, in effect, useless. Thomas Ehrlich is a former board member of the Corporation for National Service and a current scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching and Learning who studies civic engagement and service learning. He has found that "one of the reasons kids give [for their apolitical tendencies] is that they don't see a chance to make a difference. They can tutor a kid in school, clean up a park, serve in a community kitchen and feel that they're making a difference. But trying to change the political process in their community, much less the country -- they don't see that happening." </p>
<p>
Tellingly, the CIRCLE study found that the civic activities young people preferred were individual or nongovernmental: buying a certain brand because they agreed with its values, for example, or donating to a charity. After all, as Michael Delli Carpini, a scholar of civic life and the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, has noted, "Civic engagement has become <i>defined</i> as the one-on-one experience of working in a soup kitchen, clearing trash from a local river or tutoring a child once a week. What is missing is an awareness of the connection between the individual, isolated problems these actions are intended to address and the larger world of public policy." To enshrine what is in effect institutionalized volunteerism in a federal program could very well end up merely reinforcing the idea that acts of kindness, random or not, rather than governmental action, are the solution to society's ills. </p>
<p>
And that is the central paradox of national service: It is big government for people who don't like big government -- the counterpart of government support for local "faith- based" social services, or for traditional marriage as the cure for poverty. The current national service debate is really a holdover from the Clinton administration. </p>
<p>
While liberals are rightly ambivalent about national service, it has gained supporters among self-styled "national greatness" conservatives, thinkers like William Kristol and David Brooks who are concerned with restoring America's sense of purpose and grandeur. For them, government is meant not so much to govern, or even to solve social ills, but to inspire and provide its citizens with a Teddy Roosevelt-like sense of resolve and destiny. Brooks, for example, has argued that what the federal government needs to focus on is building grand monuments and institutions like the Library of Congress. </p>
<p>
Universal service would surely be an institution, and it would provide lots of people with a sense of purpose. But surely that's setting the bar pretty low for a federal program. As Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s, America has always had a rich social fabric of voluntary institutions. The point of government is not to keep its citizens busy living lives of vigorous action but to do what markets cannot. Yet active government requires an activist public agenda, which in turn depends on activated voters. If there's a paucity of civic engagement among the young, it is less in the area of volunteering than in taking seriously the enterprise of citizenship.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 17 Sep 2003 13:48:45 +0000143095 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettAffirmative Decisionhttp://prospect.org/article/affirmative-decision
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Yesterday, soon after the Supreme Court handed down its decisions in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, President Bush released a statement. It read, in part, "I applaud the Supreme Court for recognizing the value of diversity on our Nation's campuses. Diversity is one of America's greatest strengths. Today's decisions seek a careful balance between the goal of campus diversity and the fundamental principle of equal treatment under the law." Reached on the phone, the incoming dean of Michigan's law school, Evan Caminker, professed a similar satisfaction with the decision: "The Supreme Court reaffirmed the core principal of <i>Bakke</i>," he said, "which is that the school has a compelling interest in making sure students learn in an integrated environment and that race can be used in a cautious and limited way to enroll a student body that is both academically excellent and racially diverse."</p>
<p>The funny thing is, however, that Caminker and Bush had been rooting for opposite outcomes: The White House had filed an amicus brief in favor of the white plaintiffs who were suing the University of Michigan for denying them admission. That both men could profess to be pleased with the outcome suggests that yesterday's decision was a victory for the moderate status quo. Indeed, the one thing that nearly everyone can agree on about the affirmative action rulings -- in which the Court declared that the University of Michigan's law school admissions program is constitutional while its undergraduate admissions program is not -- were neither a surprise nor a bold step in either direction. However, as tempting as it is to dismiss the decisions as so much anticlimax -- especially after hearing for months just how important they would be -- it's important to keep in mind that they do mean something: For the first time, the Supreme Court has unequivocally endorsed racial preferences.</p>
<p>The affirmative action debate of the past 25 years has taken place in the long but shifty shadow of the 1978 <i>University of California Regents v. Bakke</i> case. That decision was a particularly indecisive one: Six opinions were handed down, with five justices finding that the racial preferences in the University of California, Davis Medical School's admissions policy were unconstitutional and five justices finding that UC Davis was allowed to use race in its admissions decisions. For those of you doing the math in your head, yes, that doesn't add up to nine. The extra vote was Justice Lewis Powell's, who sided with both sides. He wrote in his decision that affirmative action was constitutional, but only on the grounds that it brought diversity to institutions (as opposed, for example, to the argument many of its defenders make that it served as a reparation for historical wrongs against certain minority groups) and only if it did not rely on quotas. This distinction, though not supported by any other justice, was treated as the ruling of the Court. It was hardly, however, a monolithic decision, and those who take issue with Powell's interpretation have proceeded in the years since to dismiss his as simply one among <i>Bakke</i>'s discordant jangle of opinions.</p>
<p>Yesterday's ruling in <i>Grutter v. Bollinger</i> -- the case that concerned the law school admissions program -- gives the diversity argument a firm and unequivocal majority, and on a Court much more conservative than the one that heard the <i>Bakke</i> case. In her majority opinion, O'Connor put it as plainly as possible: "The Court endorses Justice Powell's view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions." As University of Chicago Law School professor Cass Sunstein sees it, the decision is a welcome improvement over <i>Bakke</i>: "It is not a mess. There were strong majorities for both decisions. The status of <i>Bakke</i> has been very unclear for at least a decade; now that has been straightened out." Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy agreed. "The big highlight is that the court has embraced Justice Powell's <i>Bakke</i> opinion," he said, "putting an end to speculation as to whether it's controlling law."</p>
<p>The fight now shifts to the political arena. After all, the Court's decision doesn't <i>require</i> any school to keep its affirmative action program; it just <i>allows</i> it. And in practical terms, the invalidation in the <i>Gratz v. Bollinger</i> case of the Michigan undergraduate admissions program -- a "points" system that awarded 20 out of a total 150 points to candidates for being from an "underrepresented minority" -- means that schools must adopt individualized approaches that are much more time-consuming and costly, especially for universities dealing with large applicant pools. That alone may have a de facto chilling effect on affirmative action. Roger Clegg, chief legal counsel of the anti-affirmative action Center for Equal Opportunity, thinks so. Furthermore, for him, the <i>Grutter</i> decision "means this issue will have to be fought out school by school and state by state. We're going to use all the different weapons at our disposal." Ward Connerly, who led the successful effort to rid the University of California system of its affirmative action policies, has already pledged to take his fight to other states.</p>
<p>As important as the decision was, it was still handed down with a distinctly inconclusive air. Scalia, in an opinion dripping with disdain, foresaw only more litigation. "[T]oday's <i>Grutter-Gratz</i> split double header seems perversely designed to prolong the controversy and the litigation," he wrote. Of course, Scalia no doubt would love nothing more than another shot at this issue. After all, this is a Court that's moving rightward, and should either Justice John Paul Stevens or O'Connor step down, the 5-4 <i>Grutter</i> majority will be gone. Indeed, many Court-watchers were surprised to see Justice Breyer, in the past a staunch supporter of affirmative action, join the majority in striking down the Michigan undergraduate admissions program. And Justice O'Connor's decision even came with an expiration date of sorts. To assuage her discomfort with the idea of a permanent preferences program, O'Connor, near the close of her decision, wrote, "The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."</p>
<p>So, as Randall Kennedy put it, "the struggle goes on." But affirmative action's supporters can be thankful that now they're fighting from firmer judicial ground.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:59:45 +0000140309 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettCritical Messhttp://prospect.org/article/critical-mess
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Back in January, Brazil's newly appointed minister of science and technology, Roberto Amaral, suggested in a radio interview that his country had nuclear ambitions. "Brazil is a country at peace, that has always preserved peace and is a defender of peace, but we need to be prepared, including technologically," he said. "We can't renounce any form of scientific knowledge, whether the genome, DNA or nuclear fission." It was hardly a Kim Jong-Il-caliber nuclear tantrum, but it did cause a stir. The comments were roundly condemned and a flurry of clarifications followed.</p>
<p>
But Amaral's boss, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, had made similar noises. In a campaign speech last year to retired military officers, Lula criticized the fact that the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) allowed nuclear powers to keep their weapons but denied them to everyone else. "If," he complained, "someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" Here in the United States, Lula's invocation of the forbidden nuclear fruit caught the attention of several members of Congress, who in an alarmed letter to President Bush pointed out the Brazilian leader's past ties to Fidel Castro.</p>
<p>
Brazil would have little difficulty joining the ranks of nuclear powers. For decades the country had a secret military nuclear program before renouncing it in the early 1990s. Brazil has two nuclear power plants, the capacity to enrich uranium and is developing a rocket that, if converted for military purposes, could have a range of 2,200 miles. In 1997 the Brazilian army raised suspicions by trying (unsuccessfully) to restart a military nuclear-research project.</p>
<p>
Odds are Brazil is not going nuclear anytime soon. As a country that voluntarily gave up a well-developed nuclear-weapons program, it has been one of the nonproliferation regime's success stories. But the comments of Amaral and Lula show that the nuclear temptation is still strong, not only for rogue states that find themselves in America's crosshairs but for countries around the world that aspire to great-power status. </p>
<p>
Today nuclear weapons are on Americans' minds in a way they haven't been since the height of the Cold War. Compared with the prospect of a nuclear-armed terrorist, the threat posed by a nuclear Brazil is hardly chilling. But the re-emergence of nuclear ambition in Brazil's government is alarming because it questions the ultimate endurance of nonproliferation. The Bush administration is ready to reinvent arms control, to ask questions that go to the heart of what our broader nuclear-weapons policy should be. As the alignments of the Cold War evolve into something more fluid, that's to be commended. Unfortunately, Bush's answers are only making things worse.</p>
<p>
The preemptive attack on Iraq, billed in part as a battle in a larger war against nuclear proliferation, may well have convinced other nervous nations that nukes are their only hedge against a similar fate. Then there's the administration's push for low-yield and tactical nuclear weapons, and for a nuclear policy that goes beyond mere deterrence. Throw in a pathological aversion in the Bush White House to international obligations and you have all the ingredients for destabilization, a new arms race and an increasingly unsafe world.</p>
<p>
Today's nuclear nonproliferation regime is largely the legacy of John F. Kennedy. After darkly invoking the specter of a U.S.-Soviet "missile gap" throughout his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy got into office and realized that within 10 years, the nuclear quartet of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France could grow into an unwieldy gang of 20 or 30 countries. In 1961, Kennedy created the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty and began negotiations on what was to become the NPT.</p>
<p>
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, neoconservatives forwarded the argument that the NPT had outlived its usefulness. The treaty provides no real enforcement mechanism. And nations such as India, Pakistan and Israel that were particularly interested in nuclear weapons simply refused to sign it. The Bush administration makes much of these limitations. Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation John S. Wolf told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in March that while the NPT "remains the cornerstone" of U.S. nonproliferation policy, international agreements alone "are simply not enough" to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and arms-control expert whose experience with nuclear weapons extends back to his work on the Manhattan Project itself, says the current U.S. commitment to the NPT is strictly conditional. "The Bush administration does not favor treaties," he says, "but they like the benefits of the NPT."</p>
<p>
Today's nuclear-weapons debate divides along the fault line between the "nonproliferationist" and "counterproliferationist" schools. Nonproliferationists argue that nuclear weapons are a special and an increasingly less necessary evil. Counterproliferationists are more difficult to define. Paul Bracken, a Yale University political-science professor and author of <i>Fire in the East</i>, a study of weapons of mass destruction in Asia, dismisses the term as too vague. "To some people it means forceful diplomatic action," he says. "To others it means blowing things up." But in general, counterproliferationists want to fight fire with fire. They believe that there are no evil weapons, just evil men and women who want them. Bill Keller -- writing in a recent <i>New York Times Magazine</i> cover story -- compares the counterproliferationists' suspicion of nuclear disarmament to the sentiments expressed on a National Rifle Association bumper sticker, which reads, "If nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes." Another NRA staple springs to mind, as well: "Nukes don't kill people, people do."</p>
<p>
The "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction," released by the White House last December, lays out the administration's position. In the document, counterproliferation is the first of the strategy's "three pillars," with nonproliferation taking a subsidiary role. The administration insists, however, that the two still form "seamless elements of a comprehensive approach." In theory they could be just that. And in practice they have been. The sort of muscular language on Iran and North Korea that Bush championed at the recent G8 meeting was nothing new. Counterproliferation is neither a creation of the Bush administration nor of the neoconservatives spread through its foreign-policy ranks. Rather, it was born under Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's ill-starred first defense secretary. Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out that counterproliferation was simply "the role that the Department of Defense could play in nonproliferation efforts. It was going to develop technology and programs to counter [nuclear] programs in instances when diplomacy failed, or in support of diplomacy." In other words, it was a piece of a larger nonproliferation strategy. Aspin, a fervent believer in nuclear disarmament, frankly admits that coercive military means might be required to enforce nonproliferation.</p>
<p>
But from a means, counterproliferation has grown into an end, and the original goal has dropped out of sight. The point is no longer the reduction in the number of arms but the concentration of those arms in the right hands. Counterproliferation's most radical disciples even suggest we give some of our allies nuclear weapons if they have neighbors we want to deter. Back in January, <i>Washington Post</i> columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed giving Japan nuclear weapons in order to pressure China, which would in turn pressure North Korea. "If our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea," he wrote, "China's is a nuclear Japan. It's time to share the nightmares." </p>
<p>
Making a practice of this surely wouldn't be in the interests of U.S. security. We have a patchy history of choosing lasting allies. Arming the shah of Iran might have deterred some of his neighbors, but having the Ayatollah Khomeini inherit those weapons would certainly have made us rethink that decision. And if we really want to give China nightmares we should give Taiwan nuclear weapons. But the escalation of tensions from that provocation would be its own nightmare. To follow Krauthammer's advice would be to repeat the greatest errors of the Cold War -- with exponentially higher stakes.</p>
<p>
The administration has not suggested that it wants to kick off a Far East arms race. Its counterproliferationist mind-set starts at home, with strenuous opposition to binding cuts in U.S. nuclear programs. Instead, it holds that we may need to make our nuclear posture more aggressive. A review of U.S. defense policy published in 2000 by the neoconservative hothouse The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) argues that reducing our nuclear force is likely to be dangerous; it favors not only updating it but expanding its role beyond strategic deterrence. That the Bush administration has taken this advice to heart is no surprise. Several PNAC contributors are now running U.S. foreign policy, including Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Cambone at the Pentagon and I. Lewis Libby in the White House. Douglas Feith (the undersecretary of defense), John Bolton (the undersecretary of state) and Robert Joseph (the National Security Council's senior counterproliferation official) have espoused similar views.</p>
<p>
To see this approach in action, look no further than the Moscow Treaty, which Bush signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year. It requires that each country must have no more than 1,700 to 2,200 "operationally deployed" nuclear warheads by Dec. 31, 2012 (down from today's 6,000). There is, however, no timetable for the reductions, and no enforcement mechanism. The retired weapons do not have to be destroyed or dismantled but can simply be stored (an especially disturbing prospect considering the ramshackle condition of Russian nuclear security and the Bush administration's failure to adequately fund programs aimed at the problem). Most egregiously, the treaty expires the instant the limits go into effect. As Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay wrote in these pages last year [see "One-Day Wonder," Aug. 2, 2002], "[T]he United States and Russia are free -- except for a single day a decade from now -- to deploy as many (or as few) warheads on operationally deployed systems as they like. Yes, it is as absurd as it sounds." Just in case these terms prove too onerous, either side can pull out with 90 days' notice.</p>
<p>
The treaty also makes no mention of tactical nuclear devices, the smaller "battlefield" weapons that sit in storage in both the United States and Russia. With the rest of its military atrophying from lack of money, Russia is in the unenviable position of actually relying on tactical nukes, and therefore not eager to get rid of them. Tactical nukes are hardly an important component of U.S. deterrence policy; nonetheless, the Bush administration in May pressured Congress to relax the 10-year ban on research into low-yield nukes in part to explore the possibility of "bunker-buster" bombs. (In a display of distressingly loopy logic, some advocates suggest using these weapons to destroy biological and chemical weapons stockpiles.)</p>
<p>
This cavalierly aggressive attitude has not gone unnoticed in Russia. Putin, who desperately wanted deeper reductions and a commitment to destroying deactivated weapons, was deeply disappointed and embarrassed by the agreement. In a recent speech, he proposed that Russia begin work on "new types of Russian weapons, weapons of the new generation, including those regarded by specialists as strategic weapons." He did not say "nuclear," but the implication was clear, and the comments were widely seen as a response to the Bush push for new nuclear-weapons research.</p>
<p>
Setbacks such as these might be worth the price if the Bush policy were paying off in Iran and North Korea. But it's not. Invading Iraq was supposed to show Iran and North Korea that getting nukes doesn't pay. So far, neither has shown a change of heart. That doesn't mean that they're not scared of us. Kim Jong-Il went into hiding just before the Iraq War, according to American intelligence, because he thought he, too, might be a target of "decapitation strikes." A security guarantee from the United States is the one constant in North Korea's continually shifting demands. However shrill and reckless North Korea's rhetoric, the country's nuclear program is driven largely by fear of U.S. attack. And Iran has seen a hostile neighbor (Iraq) replaced by a slightly less hostile but exponentially more powerful neighbor (the United States). The problem is not, then, that the Bush policy has been insufficiently tough. Precisely the opposite. As Cirincione says, "The lesson that Iran and North Korea seem to have drawn from the war is that they should speed up their nuclear programs, not abandon them."</p>
<p>
In light of the shortcomings of the administration's approach, it's worth taking a look at what Bush is turning his back on. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was meant not only to stop but also to reverse the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The treaty was a deal struck between the nuclear and non-nuclear powers. The latter would forswear the pursuit of nuclear arms and, in return, the former would agree to help them develop peaceful nuclear programs, to not threaten them with nuclear weapons in the event of conflict and to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament." </p>
<p>
No treaty by itself can take away the power and temptation of nuclear weapons. That nukes would cease to be the badge of great-power significance has always been somewhat utopian. For countries such as Brazil, the drive for nuclear weapons was fed as much by an unabashed desire for status as by security considerations. And Lula's bellicose campaign pronouncements show that the two-tiered NPT system of nuclear haves and have-nots still rankles.</p>
<p>
But for 30 years the NPT worked surprisingly well. China, having tested its first device in 1964, signed on as a nuclear power. Egypt, Sweden, Italy and Switzerland gave up serious nuclear-weapons programs upon signing. Along with Brazil, Argentina and South Africa eventually followed suit. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the former republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine forfeited their inherited nukes. All in all, according to a 2002 Carnegie Endowment study, at least 40 countries with the capability and knowledge of how to develop nuclear weapons have chosen not to do so.</p>
<p>
Moreover, contrary to popular conception, we're not seeing a new burst of proliferation. Since the United States founded it in 1945, the nuclear club has been growing at the rate of a new country every few years. The Soviet Union joined in 1949, Britain in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964 and Israel (though ambiguously -- to this day, its official position is the sphinx-like statement, "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East") by 1966. India tested a nuclear device in 1974, and for nearly a quarter of a century it seemed happy to have tested once without deploying any nuclear weapons. Pakistan, too, apparently had nuclear capability as of 1986, 12 years before its first test. Iraq almost joined in the early '80s and then again in the mid-90s. (As of this writing, we have yet to see any conclusive evidence that Iraq had restarted that program in recent years.)</p>
<p>
Nuclear know-how and materials have certainly grown more available. Especially in the years just after the Cold War's conclusion, it was much easier for a nuclear aspirant to find cash-strapped scientists and loose fissile materials by sifting through the fragmented remains of the Soviet empire. In the 40 years since the Manhattan Project, the technology has trickled out into the public domain. As Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, puts it, "When the first bomb was built, it took a lot of money and you had people like Einstein working on it. Now a lot of not very impressive physics Ph.Ds are working on them, and a lot of the parts can be bought off the shelf."</p>
<p>
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty ultimately did not live up to its ambitious aims. If a country really feels it needs nuclear weapons, it is very hard to change its mind, either by carrot or stick. But an increasingly isolated United States is even less able to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. An imperfect treaty at least imposes a structure and a set of norms. The "indispensable nation," as Bill Clinton called the United States, can't alone solve the nuclear problem. We can, however, aggravate it. We cannot always make countries feel safer but we can certainly make them feel less secure -- not only vulnerable rogue nations but powerful and already nuclear ones, too. </p>
<p>
In response to the triumphalism of the neocons, Fareed Zakaria wrote in <i>The New Yorker</i> that the United States was "the dominant power at the end of the Second World War, when it founded the United Nations, created the Bretton Woods system of international economic cooperation, and launched most of the world's key international organizations. For much of the twentieth century, America embraced international cooperation not out of fear and vulnerability but from a position of confidence and strength." Machiavelli said it is better to be feared than loved. But, Zakaria counters, "He was wrong." In today's world, preserving stability and equality between nations requires norms -- whether codified into treaties and international bodies or not -- and nukes. As we devalue the former by withdrawing from treaties and scoffing at multilateral institutions, we increase the value of the latter.</p>
<p>
The great irony is that the Bush administration, despite its "talk loudly and brandish a chainsaw" rhetoric, will probably continue to shrink the nuclear arsenal. Leonard Spector of the Monterey Institute's Center on Nonproliferation Studies points out that, "As a practical matter, the actual deployments are decreasing substantially, the number of warheads being dismantled continues to grow, at every stage that you look the arsenal is coming down." Behind the bluster, the administration's stance is less about nuclear weapons than about what Daalder and Lindsay call the "fetish for flexibility." But this fetish makes for a less stable world, and all the more so when nuclear weapons are involved. Out of a fear of being taken advantage of, the administration makes itself unable to be relied upon.</p>
<p>
The United States ultimately does not benefit from a world with fewer rules. The Bush administration is right to push for greater enforcement capabilities for the International Atomic Energy Agency but wrong to insist on exempting its own arsenal. If the United States suddenly got rid of its nuclear weapons, the world would not be a safer place. But it would be safer if we made a good-faith effort to create what Bracken calls an "agreed nuclear world." Such an effort should take into consideration the security considerations of countries besides our own -- it should, for example, acknowledge that dealing with proliferation in the Middle East involves addressing Israel's nuclear arsenal -- and it should work not to undermine the nuclear taboo but to ensure it. A small, transparent American nuclear arsenal might in fact be credibly seen as a defensive force, as opposed to a jealously guarded guarantor of omnipotence. In nuclear policy, as in medicine, our motto should surely be, "First, do no harm."</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:39:10 +0000143051 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettAll the President's Lieshttp://prospect.org/article/all-presidents-lies
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton was relentlessly accused by both adversaries and allies of reversing solemn commitments, not to mention his sexual dissembling. But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president.</p>
<p>
The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric -- about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the "average" American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits -- is simply at odds with what Bush's policies actually do. Last month Bush promised to enhance Medicaid; his actual policy would effectively end it as a federal entitlement program. </p>
<p>
More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-September 11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there's more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president's lies?</p>
<p>
One thing is clear: If a Democrat, say, Bill Clinton, engaged in Bush-scale dishonesty, the press would be all over him. In the spirit of rekindling public outrage, here are just some of the president's lies. </p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">The Education President</span><br /></p>
<blockquote><p>
"Every single child in America must be educated, I mean every child. ... There's nothing more prejudiced than not educating a child." -- <i>George W. Bush, presidential debate versus Vice President Al Gore, Oct. 11, 2000</i>
</p></blockquote>
<p>Along with tax cuts, education was Bush's top priority when he entered the White House. He charmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in an effort to get his bill passed, a bill that combined greater accountability and testing with increased funding. Then, in what has become a trademark, he pulled the plug on the funding. </p>
<p>
Members of Congress had good reason to believe Bush was being sincere. As governor of Texas, he had raised state education spending by 55 percent, tightened curriculum requirements and pushed for more accountability from the schools themselves. Even state test scores shot up -- although that was likely the result of the tendency to "teach to the test" rather than an actual increase in learning or knowledge. (The increase wasn't reflected in national standardized test scores.) Still, Bush was able to persuade the top two education Democrats in Congress, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), to work with him on the No Child Left Behind Act. And when the lawmakers objected to voucher provisions, Bush dropped the vouchers -- and toned down the testing measures to win Congress' approval.</p>
<p>
But in his 2003 budget, Bush proposed funding levels far below what the legislation called for, requesting only $22.1 billion of the $29.2 billion that Congress authorized. For the largest program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides support to students in impoverished school districts, Bush asked for $11.35 billion out of the $18.5 billion authorized. His 2004 budget was more than $6 billion short of what Congress authorized. Furious, Kennedy called Bush's proposal a "tin cup budget" that "may provide the resources to test our children, but not enough to teach them."</p>
<p>
The result: States already strapped by record deficits are being held responsible for the extra testing and administration mandated by law -- but aren't getting nearly enough money to pay for it. So the number of public schools likely to be labeled "failing" by the law is estimated to be as high as 85 percent. Failing triggers sanctions, from technical assistance to requiring public-school choice to "reconstitution" -- that is, firing the entire school's staff and hiring a new one. And Bush isn't doing much to help. The New Hampshire School Administrators Association calculated that Bush's plan imposed at least $575 per student in new obligations. His budget, however, provides just $77 per student. It's a revolution in education policy, all right, but No Child Left Behind was simply a lie.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">Healthy Skepticism</span><br /></p>
<blockquote><p>
"Our goal is a system in which all Americans have got a good insurance policy, in which all Americans can choose their own doctor, in which seniors and low-income citizens receive the help they need. ... Our Medicare system is a binding commitment of a caring society. We must renew that commitment by providing the seniors of today and tomorrow with preventive care and the new medicines that are transforming health care in our country." -- <i>George W. Bush, Medicare address, March 4, 2003</i>
</p></blockquote>
<p>The man simply has no shame. His program does none of this. What it does, simply, is to make dramatic cuts in the benefits for both the poor and the elderly.</p>
<p>
Under the current Medicaid program, the federal government matches, on a sliding scale, the money that states put up. The state is required to cover some beneficiaries and services, although others are "optional." But "optional" services include many essential and life-saving treatments. And "optional" beneficiaries are seldom able to pay for private insurance. Bush's plan, in effect, would turn Medicaid into a block grant, capping the federal contribution. Because states are already hard-pressed to keep up with Medicaid costs, services to the poor will simply dwindle. As Leighton Ku, a health-policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, notes, if under the current plan "you wanted to save that much money, you would have to specify which cuts to make, how to make the cuts. But it's much easier to cut the block grant because it's invisible; someone else has to make the decisions."</p>
<p>
Bush claims to bring flexibility to Medicaid, and, in a sense, he's right. Under his plan states would have, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson put it, "carte blanche" in dealing with optional benefits and optional recipients. In other words, a mother making more than $9,000 a year would be fair game, as would an 8-year-old child who lives in a family with an income just above the poverty line, or a senior citizen or disabled person living on $7,200 a year. </p>
<p>
And there's a whiff of coercion to the way in which the states are offered the option of switching to the Medicaid block grant. The states, which have already started cutting Medicaid on their own, are literally begging for federal fiscal assistance, and none is forthcoming. But if they consent to Bush's Medicaid plan, they'll get not only $3 billion in new federal money next year (a loan they would have to repay) but the ability to save money by trimming their Medicaid rolls. In other words, the president is making them an offer they can't refuse.</p>
<p>
Bush relentlessly invokes a rhetoric of choice on Medicare. But the Republican proposal pushes seniors toward heavily managed private plans that offer partial drug benefits but limit choice of treatment and doctor. If you stayed with traditional Medicare (which does offer free choice of doctor and hospital), you'd only get minimal prescription-drug benefits. The plan would spend some $400 billion over 10 years, a sum that provides coverage worth 40 percent less than that enjoyed by members of Congress under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, which Bush repeatedly invokes as a model. </p>
<p>
And while the plan allows House Republicans to avoid making politically unpopular cuts to Medicare, it requires Congress to cut $169 billion over 10 years from programs they oversee. So in the end, Medicare cuts may end up paying for prescription-drug benefits.</p>
<p>
Despite rhetoric promising to increase other health spending, a close reading of the House Republican budget proposal shows $2.4 billion in cuts for programs -- such as the National Institutes of Health, Community Health Centers and the Ryan White AIDS program -- that Bush has pledged to support. Even though Bush vowed in his State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over the next five years to provide AIDS relief to Africa, much of that money won't be available until at least 2006. [See Garance Franke-Ruta, "<a href="/print/V14/4/franke-ruta-g.html">The Fakeout</a>," <i>TAP</i>, April 2003.]</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">A Paler Shade of Green</span><br /></p>
<blockquote><p>
"Clear Skies legislation, when passed by Congress, will significantly reduce smog and mercury emissions, as well as stop acid rain. It will put more money directly into programs to reduce pollution, so as to meet firm national air-quality goals. ..." -- <i>George W. Bush, Earth Day speech, April 22, 2002</i>
</p></blockquote>
<p>Actually, the Clear Skies law doesn't do any of this. The act, in fact, delays required emission cuts by as much as 10 years, usurps the states' power to address interstate pollution problems and allows outdated industrial facilities to skirt costly pollution-control upgrades. The Environmental Protection Agency ensured that few people would notice this last regulation by announcing the change on the Friday before Thanksgiving and publishing it in the Federal Register on New Year's Eve. Still, nine northeastern states immediately filed suit against the administration; their case is pending. Meanwhile, Bush's commitment to clean water is just as murky. Despite saying last October that he wanted to "renew our commitment" to building on the Clean Water Act, he's instead decided to "update" it by removing protections for "isolated" waters and weakening sewage-overflow rules, which could significantly increase the potential for waterborne illnesses. </p>
<p>
It's hardly surprising to learn that big business is behind a lot of these changes. <i>The Washington Post</i> recounted a meeting between Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator John Graham and industry lobbyists during which the latter were encouraged to identify particularly onerous rules -- and ultimately created a regulatory "hit list." "There is a stealth campaign that's going on behind closed doors to twist the anti-regulatory process into a pretzel so that the public will be unaware that they are bottling up these protections," says Wesley Warren, the National Resources Defense Council's senior fellow for environmental economics. A good chunk of the 57-item list fell under the EPA's jurisdiction. One by one these rules have been submitted to OIRA under the Paperwork Reduction Act for cost-benefit analysis, a regulatory accounting technique that often ends up justifying watered-down rules.</p>
<p>
Even as EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced that global warming is a "real phenomenon," Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. His decision weakened the treaty's effectiveness because the United States produces 25 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.</p>
<p>
The former Texas oilman, who made one environmental promise after another on the campaign trail, has slashed the EPA's budget by half a billion dollars over two years, cut 100 employees and rolled back regulations on a near-weekly basis. "There has never been anything to compare this to," says Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy at the National Resources Defense Council. "Even in the days of Reagan, there was never an administration so willfully and almost obsessively concerned with finding ways to really undermine the environmental infrastructure."</p>
<p>
Whitman, the administration's supposed environmental champion, is also contributing to the weakening of protections. Although she said the administration was working to put in place a standard to "dramatically reduce" levels of arsenic in drinking water, she later tried to lower the existing regulation, saying that even the 10-part-per-billion federal benchmark was too tough. The EPA rolled back the standard until a report warning of health risks (and public outcry) forced the agency to reinstate the old limit.</p>
<p>
Here's another classic Bush whopper. In his State of the Union address, the president proposed $1.2 billion in research funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, in part to make the United States less reliant on foreign oil. What he didn't say is that the technology and infrastructure needed to mass produce such cars won't be available until at least 2020. If Bush truly cared about immediate relief, he might start by acknowledging existing hybrid vehicles or supporting more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for light trucks and SUVs. Neither is likely to be part of a Republican energy package this year.</p>
<p>
Democrats in the Senate dealt Bush a rare blow when they voted down his proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in March, although House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) plans to bring the issue back. Still, many lawmakers, especially in the House, feel they can do little except try to fend off the administration's attacks on the environment. "There is an absolute hostility toward any positive strengthening of environmental law," says Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. "It is a wholesale turning over to corporate America the governing of this country." </p>
<p>
Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. George W. Bush lied about all these policies because the programs he pretends to favor are far more popular than the ones he puts into effect. But unless the voters and the press start paying attention, all the president's lies will have little political consequence -- except to certify that we have become something less than a democracy.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:53:25 +0000142985 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettNumbers Game?http://prospect.org/article/numbers-game-1
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The press section at the U.S. Supreme Court is a long, narrow side gallery separated from the rest of the room by sequoia-sized columns, heavy swags of drawn curtain and elaborate grillwork. Most of the time journalists have their pick of seats, but when the gallery fills up, the view of the courtroom for all but the most fortuitously placed comprises a few rows of spectators, a portion of the far wall and ceiling, and, perhaps, the enrobed elbow of Justices Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The gallery, in other words, ensures that most journalists neither see nor are seen. It's hard not to feel like some minor courtier craning for a glimpse of the king.</p>
<p>Instilling a proper sense of awe is perhaps necessary to convince some people that it's OK for nine unelected officials to interpret the Constitution for the rest of us, but the sense of import was even greater than usual yesterday morning. The cases being argued, <i>Gratz v. Bollinger</i> and <i>Grutter v. Bollinger</i>, may well decide the future of affirmative action for years to come. Yesterday was the judicial equivalent of the "Thrilla in Manila," and the Court was packed.</p>
<p>In this case, as in nearly every close decision these days, the swing vote will belong to either Justice Anthony Kennedy or Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer are firm supporters of affirmative action; Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are staunch opponents. One of the two switch-hitters is all the University of Michigan -- which is defending affirmative action in college and grad school admissions -- needs to win, but neither justice seemed especially partial yesterday to the school's arguments. Then again, neither seemed particularly won over by the arguments of the plaintiff either, so the public will have to keep guessing for now. In the end, Kennedy and O'Connor's decisions might come down to whether they are more offended by the vagueness of diversity's defenders or the obduracy of its attackers. </p>
<p>To recap, Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter, both white, each sued the University of Michigan (or, more specifically, Lee Bollinger, the university's president at the time) -- the former because she didn't get in as an undergraduate, the latter because she was rejected by the law school. They both argued that the admissions policies of the school discriminated against them on the basis of their race. The cases are separate, and district courts ruled differently in each, finding in favor of Grutter but not of Gratz. The Grutter decision was subsequently overturned by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Gratz also appealed to the 6th Circuit, but the Supreme Court decided to hear her case along with Grutter's before the appellate court had the chance to rule.</p>
<p>The argument against affirmative action -- and, despite the occasional reference to the specifics of the University of Michigan's program, the petitioners' lawyers <i>were</i> attacking affirmative action itself -- has a comforting clarity. Kirk Kolbo and U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who jointly represented both Grutter and Gratz, argued that affirmative action's ends don't justify its means and its means don't necessarily guarantee its ends. Kolbo portrayed affirmative action as pursuing the unquantifiable goal of diversity "on the back of the constitutional right" to equal treatment under the law. Furthermore, Olson added, it paradoxically treats people as members of a group instead of individuals, equating diversity of skin tone with diversity of opinion and experience, or, as he put it, "using stereotypes in an effort to break down stereotypes."</p>
<p>In contrast, despite the sociological and psychological studies they put on display, Team Bollinger sounded rather touchy-feely. When John Payton, the lawyer defending the undergraduate admissions policy, defined the "critical mass" that admissions officers aim for -- as the number of students of a certain ethnicity needed so that "they feel comfortable acting as individuals" -- it sounded at once inexact and contradictory. Under pressure from Rehnquist, he defined an "underrepresented minority" as one that would not be represented by a "sufficient number" of students without affirmative action, and then defined a "sufficient number" as what was necessary "to meet educational goals." The whole thing seemed like a rhetorical Möbius strip.</p>
<p>After the oral arguments, Bollinger, now president of Columbia University (and himself a former law school professor), took his own stab at defining "critical mass" from the Supreme Court's steps: "Everybody likes to have clear definitions and formulas and things that will really make it easy. Most of life can't be reduced to that, and critical mass is just part of that broader reality. . . . It is an understandable impulse to want greater clarity, and yet at the end of the day anyone who thinks about it long enough realizes that you have to live with a matter of judgment." It seemed shaky ground on which to base a policy.</p>
<p>Of course, part of this difficulty is imposed by the decision in the 1978 case <i>Bakke vs. Regents of the University of California</i> -- the same decision that set the disputed precedent for diversity's role as a "compelling state interest" -- which expressly forbade quotas in university admissions. Whenever the discussion of the admissions process took a quantitative turn (and often when it didn't), Justice Scalia pounced on the quota comparison. At one point he gleefully badgered Maureen Mahoney, the lawyer for the University of Michigan Law School, on what constituted a critical mass: "Is 2 percent a critical mass, Ms. Mahoney? . . . OK, 4 percent? . . . You have to pick some number, don't you? . . . Like 8, is it 8 percent? Now, does it stop being a quota because it's somewhere between 8 and 12, but it is a quota if it's 10? I don't understand that reasoning. Once you use the term critical mass, you are into quota land." Later on, Justice Kennedy found himself at the borders of quota land, telling Payton, "Your system looks to me like a disguised quota."</p>
<p>The mismatch of hard numbers and fuzzy ideas was what angered Scalia and dismayed Kennedy. But while the diversity defense stumbled on the elasticity of its terms, its attackers overreached in the rigidity of their demands. When Kolbo repeatedly insisted that race could not be considered at all in admissions decisions, he was met -- most strikingly from O'Connor and Kennedy -- with strong skepticism. Kennedy thought that it was "a very legitimate concern" that minorities are consistently underrepresented; O'Connor pointed to a host of precedents upholding the right to consider race and upbraided Kolbo for "speaking in absolutes." </p>
<p>Paradoxically, the intransigence of Kolbo's argument lends a certain strength to those of his opponents. "The fundamental problem with the diversity rationale," according to Kolbo, "is that it depends upon the standardless discretion of educators." But Breyer objected to this characterization. The university's decisions were in fact not standardless, he responded. Admissions decisions require doing "something lawyers don't normally do, which is to select among people" while individually weighing "which one is better for this particular slot." Kolbo's objection, he went on, simply grows "out of the nature of the problem." It is something, he implied, that is tricky to handle legally -- that, in the lawyer's lexicon, demands standards but not necessarily rules. </p>
<p>Or, as Mahoney put it, the question before the court was not "whether or not [diversity] is important enough to override discrimination but whether it is discriminatory at all." Kolbo and Olson maintained that affirmative action eclipses individual merit, but it might just as easily be seen as its refinement. As affirmative action currently functions, it may be somewhat crude, but it helps society work toward a model where academic achievement is decoupled from the still very real limitations imposed by race and class. There is, after all, something deeply offensive about the idea that there is nothing wrong with our current idea of merit if whole racial and socioeconomic groups consistently perform at levels far below others. In life as in the Supreme Court's press gallery, being fortuitously placed still matters far too much.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 02 Apr 2003 18:02:27 +0000140190 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettFreedom to Failhttp://prospect.org/article/freedom-fail
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>As any advocate for the poor will tell you, measuring the success of welfare reform depends on how one defines success. If it's simply a matter of cutting the welfare rolls, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program has been the social policy equivalent of winning the space race. Between 1995 and 2001, the number of welfare recipients nationwide fell more than 50 percent after having grown steadily for decades. If success means anything broader, however, the record is somewhat less spectacular. Poverty is down and employment in single-parent families is up (no shock after an unprecedented economic boom), but not nearly in proportion to the drops in the rolls. And these indicators have all started heading in the opposite direction in the past two years.</p>
<p>
The fight over TANF's reauthorization, like the debate over its record, also turns on a semantic pivot: that of flexibility. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 ended welfare as a federal entitlement program and turned the money over to the states as fixed block grants. The idea was that the states, Louis Brandeis' "laboratories of democracy," would let a thousand innovative policies bloom.</p>
<p>
And it came to pass -- sort of. The birth of TANF served as a kind of Homestead Act for welfare reformers. From job-search seminars to drug-rehab programs to workfare to giving private companies such as Lockheed Martin a chance to run TANF employment programs, there's very little that hasn't been tried. Some of it has been heartening and some of it harrowing, but the system as a whole is nothing if not flexible, the sort of loose confederation of social entrepreneurs a Milton Friedman would love.</p>
<p>
This year, however, may see the end of welfare reform as we know it. The original TANF funding ran out last year, and, unable to agree on reauthorization, Congress has repeatedly punted, passing a series of continuing resolutions to extend the life of the program by a few months at a time. Now, with Republicans firmly in control and President Bush egging them on, Congress seems set to produce something more long term. In mid-February, the House passed a bill nearly identical to the one it approved last May -- which in turn closely tracked the proposal Bush made the previous February. Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has made passage of a Senate bill one of his top priorities as majority leader.</p>
<p>
One would think that an administration that has proven reluctant, if not hostile, to the regulation of pollution, workplace safety and magical-realist accounting practices wouldn't want to interfere in the welfare programs of the states. But, as he has made clear, Bush believes the states have abused the leeway that's been given them. In a speech in South Carolina last July, he charged: "States require work of only about 5 percent of the adults on welfare. In other words, the goal is incredibly low." (He doesn't mention that most programs far exceed those targets: The Department of Health and Human Services' most recent report puts the actual percentage of welfare recipients in work or work-related activities at upward of 34 percent.) Despite his misgivings, however, Bush says he still believes in the states. "Congress," he said, "must always remember that when they write law, that we've got to trust the local folks, as well; that one size doesn't fit all when it comes to trying to help people help themselves." </p>
<p>
But what about his plan's vaunted flexibility? Apparently it doesn't apply to the matter of work hours. Under Bush's proposal, states would be penalized if they didn't have 70 percent of their welfare recipients working by 2007. Right now the requirement is 50 percent, though the precipitous drops in welfare rolls in the late 1990s exempted most states from it. In addition, Bush's plan would raise the number of work hours required per family. Currently it varies between 35 hours for a two-parent family to 20 hours for a single parent with a child under six. In his estimation, a 40-hour workweek is "the definition of work."</p>
<p>
That's not the only defining he does. Programs such as vocational training, bilingual education and drug treatment that states have set up to try to address enduring barriers to employment could only count in a limited way toward the new work requirement. All in all, according to a National Governors Association survey, welfare officials in 35 states believe they will have to make "fundamental changes" to their programs if the Bush plan becomes law. And welfare recipients will suffer as a result. "The National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies," the largest study of its kind, found that combining education and job-search programs had the most success in placing welfare recipients in well-paid and stable jobs.</p>
<p>
Plus, in a tough labor market there may not be enough jobs to meet the 70 percent bar. As a result, states would be forced to create publicly funded work programs, or workfare. David Ellwood, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Clinton welfare adviser (who left the administration deeply disappointed with TANF), says, "Workfare doesn't work; they're make-work jobs. That's how states are going to increase employment in the middle of a recession: make-work jobs." States and localities have largely come to the same conclusions themselves. Those that have tried workfare have dropped it, partly due to the administrative costs and bureaucratic headaches and partly because workfare has proved remarkably ineffective at getting people into real jobs.</p>
<p>
And then there's the cost. Bush is freezing the TANF funding levels right where they are, which, with inflation, amounts to a de facto cut. But the Congressional Budget Office predicts that over the next five years, the new work requirements would cost $8 billion to $11 billion more than the current TANF budget, mostly on increased child-care costs and workfare programs. Because the entire yearly block grant is $16.5 billion, that's quite a shortfall. </p>
<p>
Which brings us to the alternate definition of flexibility. Tucked away in the administration proposal and the House bill is a provision for "superwaivers" that would allow states to petition the federal government to circumvent federal rules, not only in TANF but in food stamps, public-housing programs, the Workforce Investment Act and elsewhere. A governor who wanted to reroute funding from one of those programs or sought to make deeper cuts than the law allows would simply have to petition the appropriate federal department. Congress wouldn't be able to do a thing about it. </p>
<p>
As a result, with pinched budgets and overwhelming work requirements, the states' ability to innovate would be increasingly focused on finding creative ways of reducing welfare recipients' claims. Some might try, for example, merging TANF and the Food Stamp Program, thereby applying TANF time limits and work requirements to food-stamp eligibility. Or a state could apply to raise public-housing rents above the congressionally mandated level. The more dire a state's fiscal situation (and right now, for most of them, it's more dire than at any time in 50 years), the more creative its cost-cutting measures are likely to be. And it's not hard to see this administration, as assiduous as it has been in pressuring states to cut spending in such programs as Medicaid, allowing all sorts of dubious innovations.</p>
<p>
What the superwaiver amounts to, as Deborah Weinstein of the Children's Defense Fund puts it, is "a very one-way kind of flexibility: the flexibility to cut." By contrast, the administration has doggedly opposed any suggestion that states get normal, old-fashioned waivers allowing them to keep welfare programs that didn't meet the new work requirements.</p>
<p>
According to Shawn Fremstad of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there is "plenty of flexibility already in programs like Food Stamps." The only reason to propose a superwaiver, then, is to open the door to some truly radical measures, the sorts of things that would never get through Congress. As Ellwood sees it, the measure is an administrative flanking maneuver, a means to attack "popular programs that are much harder to reduce or dismantle" through the legislative process.</p>
<p>
If so, it couldn't come at a worse time. The great experiment of welfare reform took place in almost absurdly favorable economic conditions. With the boom over and the welfare rolls starting to rise again, TANF is just now being challenged. President Bush says he wants a flexible program, but whether we end up with the flexibility to combat poverty or simply the flexibility to cut funding may determine whether the system bends or breaks.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 26 Mar 2003 00:54:23 +0000142973 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettEqual Opportunistshttp://prospect.org/article/equal-opportunists
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>You'd think Microsoft would have had enough by now, but the software leviathan is back in court, and brazen ingrate that it is, it's taking on the Bush administration. At least, by proxy. In a rare fissure between George W. Bush and big business, Microsoft has banded together with 64 fellow Fortune 500 companies, from Alcoa to Xerox, <a href="http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/gru_amicus-ussc/um/Fortune500-both.pdf" target="outlink">to file an amicus brief supporting the University of Michigan</a> in the two affirmative-action cases pending before the Supreme Court -- cases in which the Bush administration has filed an opposing brief. And card-carrying corporate types aren't the only unlikely defenders of racial and ethnic preferences. While it's no surprise to see the United Negro College Fund, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the National Organization of Women's legal defense fund filing in favor of affirmative action, it <i>is</i> somewhat odd to see retired <a href="http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/legal/gru_amicus-ussc/um/MilitaryL-both.pdf&lt;br /&gt;&#10;" target="outlink">Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and a parade of former top military brass</a> taking up the cause. After all, the military -- which greeted President Clinton's attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the armed forces as if he were suggesting arming the 101st Airborne with squirt guns -- hasn't always been a bastion of socially progressive thinking.</p>
<p>In other words, corporate America and the military, the two biggest beneficiaries of Bush administration largesse, are publicly breaking with the administration on racial preferences. Not only that, they're making their stand at a time when the public largely opposes affirmative action. A mid-January poll done for <i>Newsweek</i> by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that 68 percent of Americans -- and 56 percent of minorities -- oppose preferences for blacks in college and university admissions. Preferences for Hispanics and Asians fared even worse. (For the record, athletic and legacy preferences were the least popular, while preferences for "musicians and students with other special talents" fared slightly better than preferences for Hispanics.)</p>
<p>So why are these two pillars of the establishment taking on both the mainstream <i>and</i> the Bushies? Has the spirit of Rosa Parks been sweeping the corporate boardroom and the officers' mess? Probably not. In fact, the corporate and military briefs show just how conservative some of the arguments for affirmative action have become.</p>
<p>The 64 Fortune 500 companies argue in their brief that they have a "vital interest" in the continuation of affirmative action, and that a diverse workplace "is important to <i>amici</i>'s continued success in the global marketplace." A diverse workforce, the brief goes on, is more innovative, more receptive to the needs of a varied clientele, better suited to an increasingly international business climate and less likely to discriminate against other workers. Diversity is, then, if not what former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell called a "compelling state interest," at least a compelling corporate interest. As Oakland, Calif.-based diversity consultant Jacob Herring puts it, diversity helps people "become aware of their assumptions, the assumptions that made you successful three months ago and that, if gone untested, will torpedo you. It's a skill; becoming aware of your assumptions and testing them is a skill."</p>
<p>The brief, however, offers no evidence to substantiate these claims. And while talking to businessmen and women does yield plenty of anecdotes regarding contracts lost because of racially insensitive comments or cross-cultural faux pas, studies linking diversity and improved performance are few and inconclusive. It's an understandable dearth given the difficulty of measuring things such as innovation or receptivity to different cultures; nevertheless, without a more compelling link to the bottom line, this doesn't seem to be the sort of rationale that drives a large corporation to take a public stance.</p>
<p>But simply taking a stance is part of the point. Whether a company's been in the news for blocking cheap AIDS drugs in Africa, busting unions in Latin America, cooking the books or, in Microsoft's case, fighting off discrimination lawsuits filed by former employees, it can't hurt to look good on diversity. And it really <i>can</i> hurt not to. Large public companies, like politicians, are vulnerable to pressure from groups such as the Rainbow Coalition, which keep a sharp eye out for anything looking like discrimination and are ready to mobilize in response. As Herring recalls, for "one of my one-time clients, a retail company, blacks accounted for 18 percent of their bottom line; if a Jesse Jackson or someone like him called a boycott, if he knocked as much as 3 percent off the bottom line, their stock would plummet. They don't want that to happen, and they're going to do everything they can to look like a good corporate citizen on that issue." Roger Clegg, of the anti-affirmative action Center for Equal Opportunity, sees it in a more lurid light, saying, "It's like paying money to the mob."</p>
<p>It goes deeper than that, however. Companies have made an investment in affirmative action. They've hired diversity consultants, set hiring goals based on race and ethnicity, subjected their employees to racial-sensitivity training. To have the concept invalidated would in turn invalidate all of those investments -- and perhaps open them up to reverse-discrimination lawsuits from employees. As the Fortune 500 brief puts it, "These extensive efforts are part of the very fabric of <i>amici</i>'s cultures." Affirmative action has become as much the status quo as the man in the gray flannel suit once was.</p>
<p>A similar rationale suggests itself in the brief submitted by the former military officers. It presents affirmative action in the military service academies as a matter of combat readiness. Affirmative action is hardly necessary to fill the ranks with minorities, but an increasingly diverse military demands matching commanding officers. That lesson, as the brief tells it, was learned in Vietnam, when the lack of black officers and "the discrimination perceived to be its cause led to low morale and heightened racial tension . . . As that war continued, the armed forces suffered increased racial polarization, pervasive disciplinary problems, and racially motivated incidents in Vietnam and on posts around the world." Creating a diverse officer corps through aggressive affirmative action was and remains a way to blunt racial tensions and maintain morale. </p>
<p>The strange thing about this argument, though, is that it's the same one that was used to justify keeping blacks and white soldiers segregated until 1950. Then, too, the measure was a means of preserving morale and blunting racial tensions, a capitulation to the preconceptions of the enlisted man: The troops won't be comfortable with it, it will sap their fighting spirit, we therefore shouldn't do it. It's the same argument that motivates today's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gays in the military.</p>
<p>So there is a fundamentally conservative tenor to the pro-affirmative action arguments of the establishment: Fortune 500 companies are concerned about ensuring continued returns on an investment while the military wants to maintain discipline in the ranks. This should come as no surprise -- after all, these are fundamentally conservative institutions. Moreover, the conservatism of these arguments should encourage, not disappoint, supporters of affirmative action. Appeals for racial justice are, of course, more likely to succeed when yoked to the power of self-interest.</p>
<p>But perhaps what's most striking about the corporate brief is how little daylight there is between it and the Bush brief. The former lauds diversity but avers that "<i>Amici</i> are not in a position to evaluate the propriety or efficacy of any particular admissions program." The latter, meanwhile, attacks the particularities of the University of Michigan's admissions policy while insisting that "measures that ensure diversity, accessibility, and opportunity are important components of government's responsibility to its citizens." It is, in other words, a difference of emphasis more than substance -- and, perhaps more than anything else, shows the narrowness of the middle ground where both sides of the establishment have uneasily staked out their positions on affirmative action.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 Mar 2003 07:20:25 +0000140153 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettGulfing Buddieshttp://prospect.org/article/gulfing-buddies
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Perhaps the most flattering thing former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ever said about the United Nations was buried in a supposedly conciliatory address to the organization three years ago: "Most Americans do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself -- they see it as just one part of America's diplomatic arsenal. To the extent that the UN is effective, the American people will support it. To the extent that it becomes ineffective -- or worse, a burden -- the American people will cast it aside."</p>
<p>Helms, of course, held the United Nations in special contempt. It's a contempt shared by the more hawkish members of the current Bush administration, which was why the president's decision last fall to seek UN approval for an Iraq invasion struck many as either a public-relations move or a grudging concession to the cautious multilateralism of the country's political center. But as Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation last Wednesday to the UN Security Council made clear, the entire gambit has turned out pretty well for the administration. Far from impeding the planned invasion, the UN inspections regime has allowed the administration to dodge some of the more tricky questions involved. The so-called inspections trap -- the hawks' nightmare scenario in which inspections would become, in the words of Helms, "an end in and of itself" -- has not materialized. Instead of a trap, the inspections have turned out to be a trip wire, and those whose tepid opposition to the war once took the form of calls to multilateralism are to blame.</p>
<p>The press reaction to Powell's bravura performance last Wednesday at the Security Council was <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2078196/" target="outlink">summed up</a> by Fred Kaplan in <i>Slate</i>: Should Saddam Hussein continue to stonewall, he wrote, "How can any objective observer, or any world leader, continue to make a case against war?" George F. Will <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32574-2003Feb5.html" target="outlink">declared</a> that the bill of particulars Powell presented "will change all minds open to evidence." Liberal <i>Washington Post</i> columnist Mary McGrory titled her <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32573-2003Feb5.html" target="outlink">column</a> "I'm Persuaded." But persuaded of what? That Hussein is not complying with inspections? That he does nasty things and develops illegal weapons? Who ever thought otherwise?</p>
<p>The problem with this logic is that evidence of misdeeds, even grave misdeeds, is not in and of itself a reason to invade Iraq. War isn't a matter of just deserts; it's not a punishment for a country's sins. It is, in Carl von Clausewitz's shopworn phrase, "politics by other means." But now the debate over Iraq has ceased to be a political debate; it has become a technical one over who did what when and where was the botulinum toxin on the night of so and so. The inspections have shifted the discussion from substantive grounds (Is war the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein?) to formal ones (Is Saddam Hussein obeying UN rules?) -- that is, from a point of great contention to a no-brainer.</p>
<p>Which is all well and good for the administration, because in truth there is plenty left to argue about. The idea that the United States is going to war to protect the reputation of the United Nations -- a reputation the United States has, as much as any other country, helped to undermine -- is laughable. Our timorous treatment of North Korea and our indulgence of Pakistan, both of which harass their neighbors and sell their nuclear secrets on the open market, belie the contention that we cannot live with rogue nuclear states. The claim that this is a humanitarian intervention would demand we take a host of our Central Asian and Middle Eastern allies to account; it might also lead us to think a bit more about how many Iraqis we will actually kill in an effort to liberate their country. Iraq's tenuous link to terrorism would require that we also roll our tanks through Qatar, which gave shelter to the same al-Qaeda terrorist that later turned up in Iraq. And the insistence that Hussein is undeterrable and that his removal will stabilize the region depends, in the words of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/opinion/02MEAR.html" target="outlink">political scientist John Mearsheimer</a>, upon "distorted history and dubious logic."</p>
<p>There are, to be sure, rebuttals to these arguments -- some more convincing than others. But the administration doesn't really need to make them any more. It simply needs to point to its incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi noncompliance with inspections. And the irony is, it is the multilateralist quasi-doves of the Democratic Party who have let the administration off the hook. The narrow legal debate we're left with is the logical endpoint of Democratic leaders such as Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and former Vice President Al Gore deciding last fall to simply shunt the debate onto the United Nations. Seen in this light, Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) "progressive multilateralism" seems less an argument than an abdication. And the Democratic strategy of avoiding a real debate in October is allowing the administration to avoid a real debate now.</p>
<p>No doubt this logic will strike many hawks -- itching as they are for an invasion to begin -- as <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/219wmwnj.asp" target="outlink">deeply unfair</a>. The Bush administration has played by the rules laid out last fall by multilateralist Democrats. It went through the United Nations; it gave inspections time to work; now the inspections have failed. What more could liberals possibly want? But conservatives misunderstand (or pretend to misunderstand) the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. UN approval, cooperation from our allies and a chance for inspections to dig up evidence against Hussein were always <i>necessary</i> conditions for an invasion; whether they are <i>sufficient</i> conditions for war is another question entirely. Unfortunately, the quasi-dove Democrats -- lacking the courage to simply suggest outright that this war might just plain <i>be a bad idea</i> -- hid last fall behind the implication that multilateralism was both necessary <i>and</i> sufficient. We may be about to pay for their mistake.</p>
<p>After all, to channel Helms for a moment, what's so great about multilateralism as an end in and of itself? The UN Security Council is made up of representatives from countries operating in their own self-interests. Just because a few European nations agree to something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, especially when it's obvious that a good deal of bilateral arm-twisting is taking place. The administration got its inspections trip wire. But it's the quasi-dove Democrats who got stuck in the inspections trap.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 Feb 2003 18:44:02 +0000140110 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettCampaign Pinhttp://prospect.org/article/campaign-pin
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Yesterday, in the ballroom of the National Press Club, Nancy Tate had her first smackdown. She was pleasantly surprised. Tate, who is the executive director of the League of Women Voters and has the unobtrusive demeanor of a court stenographer, shared a stage with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO Linda McMahon, U.S. Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), state Rep. Tony Sertich (D-Minn.), three WWE wrestlers and about 30 exhilarated high-school students. They were all there to unveil the second phase of "Smackdown Your Vote!" a get-out-the-vote program spearheaded by the WWE (formerly the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, until a lawsuit from the World Wildlife Fund forced the name change).</p>
<p>After the press conference, Tate posed for a photo with Kurt Angle -- the honorary chairman of "Smackdown Your Vote!" and a two-time WWE champion (as well as intercontinental champion, European champion, hardcore champion, 2000 "king of the ring" and the inventor of the "angle slam") -- and his fellow super-pugilist and co-chair Bradshaw, who looks like a polyploidy Steven Seagal with a Nixonish nose. Tate seemed rather charmed, in a bemused sort of way, by the whole thing. She wasn't overly concerned about aligning her organization with one that unabashedly fashions itself as the collective id of the young American male. Instead, she noted, "I think they're serious about it; they have a certain enthusiasm and that's quite important in our media culture." She remarked on how well-informed the WWE contingent had seemed. (McMahon at one point offhandedly mentioned that the 26th Amendment, which gives 18-year-olds the right to vote, had enjoyed "the fastest ratification of any amendment in history.") Of course, Tate went on to admit, "They had to clue me in to what a 'smackdown' was."</p>
<p>Those of us more familiar with the term may still wonder how we can smack down our votes. Well, if we've registered to vote or, better yet, actually voted, we already have. But the majority of the votes in Smackdown's target demographic of 18-30 year olds have yet to be smacked down. The program was started in 2000 when the WWE joined a coalition that included voter outreach groups such as the Youth Vote Coalition and Project Vote Smart, which were seeking to redress one of the most striking imbalances in the American electorate: the fact that a large number of the nation's young, voting-age adults have rejected the political process. In 1996 and 2000, barely a third of 18-24-year-olds voted, about half the rate for those 65 and over. As a result, the young, though the prize quarry of TV advertisers, are pretty much ignored by politicians -- which is why we live increasingly in a stone-cold gerontocracy.</p>
<p>Thus far the WWE's visibility and fondness for exclamation points have made some modest headway against voter apathy. Through public-service announcements, voter-registration drives, WWE high-school and college tours and registration booths at WWE events, "Smackdown Your Vote!" has signed up 400,000 new voters, presumably mostly young ones. Yesterday's press conference, which had an audience of perhaps a dozen journalists and more than 400 teenagers, was held to kick off its second round, dubbed "A Million More in 2004!"</p>
<p>Why is the WWE getting involved in the get-out-the-vote racket? McMahon presents it as a matter of civic responsibility. In the crisply articulate tones of the no-nonsense businesswoman, she speaks from her experience as the head of WWE, which is, in her words, "essentially a marketing company." She wants to create a sense of "brand loyalty" for the concept of democracy. Ford and GM are aiming ads at kids too young to drive, so why not sell voting to those under 18? It's an impressive pitch, though left unsaid is the prospect that perhaps WWE wants to be known for something other than teaching America's youth acrobatic ways of beating the crap out of one another. </p>
<p>Despite all the gruff-voiced exhortations, no one knows if WWE's "come for the buffoonish brutality, stay for the grass-roots democracy" strategy will work. There's little evidence, for example, that MTV's "Rock the Vote" -- the most prominent of recent celebrity voter-outreach programs -- does all that much besides burnish the activism credentials of famous musicians. Perhaps the alienation of young citizens from politics is too deep to be bridged by the haranguing of celebrities, no matter how well-oiled and muscular. </p>
<p>But if the WWE can bring Hulk Hogan out of retirement, as it recently did, perhaps it can do anything. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), himself a former middle-school wrestling coach, saw the power of the franchise when he invited The Rock to the 2000 Republican National Convention. We've always had a special place in our hearts for brawny and rambunctious political figures, from Teddy Roosevelt (aka the "Bull Moose") to James George Janos (aka Jesse "The Body" Ventura). And in four years, we may very well see Arnold Schwarzenegger (aka "The Terminator") in the California gubernatorial race. Like politics, professional wrestling is an unholy mix of melodrama, noise, petty vendettas, manufactured emotion, klieg lights and fog machines. For Ventura, who honed his debating skills co-hosting <i>Prime Time Wrestling</i> with the inimitable Gorilla Monsoon, politics is simply wrestling by other means. For the folks at WWE, it's as simple as that.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 04 Feb 2003 04:22:28 +0000140098 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettClass Dismissedhttp://prospect.org/article/class-dismissed
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>It's official. John Edwards (D-N.C.), the telegenic senator with the tobacco-road twang, is running for president, and doctors and HMO executives and chambers of commerce across the country are undoubtedly <i>not</i> lining up to offer their support. (After all, Edwards made his fortune as a trial lawyer, bagging eye-popping sums in personal-injury and medical-malpractice lawsuits.) But there's another category of people who should be apprehensive about the prospect of an Edwards White House: college applicants counting on a little help getting into mom or dad's alma mater. As part of his education platform, Edwards has proposed eliminating the legacy preference from college and university admissions. It's a move designed to play to his strengths as a candidate -- and it might even recast the long-simmering debate over college admissions.</p>
<p>For someone with a political career that's barely 4 years old and lacking in substantive accomplishments, reaching for the presidency is a brazen move. But like his rival Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Edwards' appeal lies largely in what he did before being elected to public office. Kerry, the melancholic Boston Brahmin, trades on an aura of noblesse oblige that comes from having volunteered as a young man to go to Vietnam and fight in a war he opposed. Edwards, on the other hand, is the bootstrap kid, his tale one of pluck, luck and a courtroom manner that played well with juries. So just as Kerry generously laces his public statements with references to his military service -- and his political opponents' lily-livered lack thereof -- Edwards routinely tints his campaign rhetoric with references to his humble upbringing and tough climb to the top. </p>
<p>For Edwards, a college education is the linchpin of the upward mobility he represents and celebrates. Edwards the candidate may occasionally overstress his salt-of-the-earth bona fides -- as <i>The New Yorker</i>'s Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, Edwards' family was middle class, not working class -- but the fact remains that he was the first member of his family to go to college, and he did work his way through with jobs on a road crew, at a mill and loading delivery trucks. </p>
<p>Edwards' Ragged Dick-style narrative shines all the more when compared with that of the man he would be running against. George W. Bush was a legacy admission at Phillips Academy aka Andover and then Yale University, where he neither applied nor distinguished himself. While Edwards aced law school and then went on to a fantastically successful legal career, Bush coasted through business school and went on to a mediocre career as a businessman, repeatedly saved from failure -- and eventually made a multimillionaire -- by dint of his family connections.</p>
<p>The legacy-admissions issue, then, casts Edwards as the embodiment of the American dream and Bush as its antithesis. As Edwards put it in a speech on education this November at the University of Maryland in College Park, "The legacy preference rewards students who had the most advantages to begin with. It is a birthright out of 18th-century British aristocracy, not 21st-century American democracy. It is wrong." Later he added, "There is no royalty in America." The imagery is clear -- George W. equals George III -- and the rhetoric familiar. It is the language of populism, but with a twist: It is a middle-class populism, one pitched to the slice of society that is wealthy enough to send its kids to college but not established enough to be part of the club. Edwards' official announcement of his presidential candidacy on yesterday's <i>Today Show</i> was full of similar language about fighting for "regular folks" against the interests of "insiders" and career politicians. That special privileges and perks everywhere are under fire at the moment only strengthens the appeal of Edwards' message.</p>
<p>So might we expect a President Edwards to call out the National Guard to end the privileges of legacy admits? No. Edwards may paint himself as the patron saint of the little guy but he's not the type to waste energy on lost causes. As he well knows, the federal government can't do much to make colleges eliminate their legacy-admissions policies. Not being the child of a Princeton University alum, for example, isn't a protected category such as race or disability -- and discrimination on that basis is not grounds for legal action. That's why Edwards' legacies proposal, while vaguely hinting at government action, relies more on moral suasion, challenging colleges and universities to "live up to their ideals and America's ideals on their own."</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, college administrators are reluctant to do so. They insist that legacy admissions are a red herring. Tom Dingman, associate dean of Harvard College, for example, said, "I never felt that we did anything irresponsible with legacy admissions here." He points out that mommy or daddy's name means less than it used to, and that legacies do have to show that they can cut it academically to be admitted. But if it makes so little difference, why have it? Because membership still needs to have its privileges. Or, as Dingman puts it, the practice "heightens the sense of loyalty among those whose children are admitted." That loyalty, of course, is often expressed financially. And while admissions officers such as Diana Cook at Yale deny that there's anything like a quid pro quo going on -- she points out, "The money is dealt with by the development office; we don't care about it, it doesn't go in our pockets" -- the fact remains that the family that goes to homecoming together usually donates together.</p>
<p>But even if Edwards' proposal has little immediate effect, it may well help shape the debate over affirmative action that is once again gaining volume now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to revisit the issue. Ever since the landmark 1978 <i>Regents of the University of California v. Bakke</i> case, the argument over affirmative action has fallen along the fault line of diversity versus merit. Supporters list the benefits of a rainbow-colored student body; critics lament the injustice of a system that privileges race over qualifications. Part of the value of Edwards' proposal is that it shifts the focus from race to class -- or, to put it more crudely, it redirects the resentment aimed at minority interlopers toward entrenched elites. Getting rid of the legacy preference means both more meritocracy <i>and</i> more diversity. </p>
<p>In doing so, though, it creates some odd bedfellows. For example, it brings Edwards, a committed advocate for affirmative action, into ideological alignment with, for example, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who singled out the legacy issue in his recent repentant Black Entertainment Television interview. Similarly, Ruth Chavez, former Bush cabinet nominee and president of the anti-affirmative-action Center for Equal Opportunity, endorsed Edwards' proposal when asked about it (though with caveats about an overly intrusive federal government). "As a matter of policy, I'm not in favor of legacies at public colleges and universities," she said. "They have a tendency to reinforce the privileges of class more than anything else. And they have a disproportionate effect on Hispanics."</p>
<p>But while Chavez in the same breath decries both affirmative action and legacy admissions, Edwards' position highlights the flimsiness of the core assumption of affirmative-action critics: that affirmative action imposes a political agenda on an otherwise ideologically neutral process. Colleges take all sorts of things -- some laudable, some less so -- into account when making admissions decisions. There are slots set aside for squash players and bassoonists and linguists and political activists and, yes, kids with the same last names as some of the dormitories. As Dingman freely admits, "We're not a meritocracy to begin with. We look to build a class in which people will have an opportunity to learn from each other."</p>
<p>A statement such as that, of course, would probably not sit so well with Edwards. There are hints in it of the old idea of the "well-rounded student," which, in the words of longtime education writer (and <i>Prospect</i> senior correspondent) <a href="http://www.prospect.org/authors/schrag-p.html" target="outlink">Peter Schrag</a>, basically meant "you wore white shoes and you went to Deerfield." We may have come a long way since the days of the "gentleman's C," but it's a measure of how far we have to go that -- as John Edwards knows and surely hopes to exploit -- we're currently governed by a man who was a legacy admission to high school, college and the White House.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 03 Jan 2003 19:02:27 +0000140049 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettPut a Face on Your Fearshttp://prospect.org/article/put-face-your-fears
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>hey had to wage a campaign in equal parts deceitful and dynamic to get there, but when Congress convenes in January, Republicans will control the Senate. The Democrats' capacity to impede the Bush agenda has been whittled down to the occasional filibuster. Their ability to inquire about the administration's most glaring lunacies is gone. Not that the Democrats were any great shakes when they ran the Senate, but now they must struggle to be anything more than indignant footnotes to a reactionary text.</p>
<p>
The new Senate will differ from the old chiefly in that it will speed, not impede, the flow of legislation coming from the White House, and will look the other way when the administration cuts any but the most egregious deals for its friends. The unacknowledged legislator of the nation is Karl Rove, and the job of this particular legislature -- as he and his boss made very clear while prodding the lame-duck session to enact a wretched homeland-security bill -- is to implement his vision.</p>
<p>
Still, this is the U.S. Senate, a somewhat quaint institution where power is still diffused, where a single senator can still gum up the works and where a committee chairman can still retain discretion for all manner of mis- or good deeds unless and until the White House harrumphs. Not all chairmen are created equal; in the 108th Congress convening Jan. 7, some will seek to moderate the demands of the cultural conservatives, the expatriate corporations and the administration war hawks while others will choose to outyell them.</p>
<p>
We offer, then, a guide to the new powers in the land -- the incoming chairs of the Senate committees. We've ranked them in the order of the magnitude of the shift we're likely to see when they take the gavel from their Democratic predecessors -- which means, we're assessing those Democratic predecessors as well. Thus we start with the Environment and Public Works Committee, where the incoming chairman views punching more holes in the ozone layer as just a good day's work. We end with the Finance Committee, less because the incoming chairman is a moderate Republican than because the outgoing chairman is in reality a moderate Republican, too.<br /><br />-- Harold Meyerson</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">1. A Planet at Risk<br /><br />
The Committee on Environment and Public Works: <br /><br />
James Jeffords (I-Vt.) to James Inhofe (R-Okla.)</span><br /><br /><br />
The biggest and probably the most calamitous shift in committee chairmen will occur in the Environment Committee. There, greens see red when they contemplate James Inhofe, who is set to take over from James Jeffords. "When voters went to the polls they didn't vote for people who were going to weaken environmental protections, but that's what they've gotten," says Alys Campaigne, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If you look at the leadership, if you look at Inhofe, [you realize that] it's payback time for big industry." Inhofe received a rating of absolute 0 percent from the environmental League of Conservation Voters (LCV) in 1999 and 2000. (Jeffords received LCV ratings of 89 percent and 71 percent, respectively, for those two years.) Indeed, Inhofe even managed to oppose the Bush White House for being too pro-environment and was the only senator to vote against the Bush brothers' Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.</p>
<p>
Jeffords used his chair to criticize the Bush administration's environmental record and to proselytize for renewable energy, neither of which is a mission that Inhofe is inclined to undertake. The Oklahoma senator has long been a hysterical critic of the Environmental Protection Agency, likening Carol Browner, Clinton's EPA administrator, to Tokyo Rose and the agency itself to the Gestapo. He's a proponent of applying cost-benefit analyses to environmental regulation such as the Clean Air Act, and in 1997, Inhofe tried unsuccessfully to block the Clinton administration's tougher clean-air regulations. While Inhofe claims to be simply exposing the costs of environmental legislation, environmentalists such as Campaigne brand cost-benefit analyses "code for putting industry's interests first." </p>
<p>
Tellingly, Inhofe spokesman Gary Hoitsma points out, "It's [called] the Committee on Environment and Public Works, not just environment, and the transportation bill is going to be a big priority for us." That bill sets the funding levels for the transportation bill, but it also has public-health and environmental implications; and its passage will set off debates over how much to spend on roads as opposed to public transit and how (or whether) to address the air pollution caused by automobile traffic. Look for Inhofe to come down squarely on the side of roads -- not of trains, and not of lungs.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">2. Here Come the Old Testament Judges<br /><br />
The Committee on the Judiciary: <br /><br />
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)</span><br /><br /><br />
Orrin Hatch may demonstrate an occasional willingness to work across party lines, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he'll be working to implement the far right's agenda. According to spokeswoman Margarita Tapia, Hatch's top priority will be "to move the president's nominees diligently and fairly through the committee." Translation: The Judiciary Committee will rubber-stamp every right-wing ideologue Bush nominates for a judgeship. High atop this list are the ethically challenged pro-lifer Priscilla Owens and the abortion-attacking Charles Pickering. Under outgoing Chairman Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee rejected Owens and Pickering the first time around, but everyone expects Bush to renominate them and Hatch to speed their names to the Senate floor. ("Sen. Hatch is supportive of both of those two nominees," says Tapia.) Rumor also has it that, with Hatch controlling the Judiciary Committee, the aging and ailing Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor may seize the day and retire from the Supreme Court. </p>
<p>
And that's just one side of Hatch's Hall of Horrors; the campaign to submerge civil liberties is another. "Vigorous oversight of the Department of Justice is critical, and is much less likely to happen under Hatch," worries Julie Fernandes, senior policy analyst and special counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. As part of possibly the most secretive administration ever to grace this land of freedom, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and company have been chipping away at civil liberties since September 11. Ashcroft has issued a series of administrative directives, and capitalized on expanded powers from the USA Patriot Act, in an attempt to establish a nationwide dragnet so intrusive and arbitrary that it has produced a backlash even among local and state police forces across the country. On these matters, Leahy (who had a 2000 American Civil Liberties Union rating of 57 percent) was a thorn in the administration's side, holding illuminating hearings on everything from the shadowy activities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to the first comprehensive review of the FBI in two decades, to the authoritarian implementation of the USA Patriot Act. And that's not to mention Leahy's success in derailing Ashcroft's Stasi-style TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program. </p>
<p>
Hatch (who enjoyed a 2000 ACLU rating of 14 percent) isn't likely to convene many civil-liberties hearings. Then there are such perennial right-wing crusades as corporate-sponsored tort reform and the ban on partial-birth abortion. At least we'll all feel safe from terrorism ... right?</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">3. Workers of the World, Duck! <br /><br />
The Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions: <br />Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) to Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)<br /></span><br />
By common consent, Ted Kennedy has been long been Capitol Hill's most important force for worker and consumer interests. Now, he's had to surrender his gavel to a Republican who's his antithesis on nearly every issue. Incoming Chairman Judd Gregg has a 2 percent lifetime voting record on the AFL-CIO's index of worker-related issues, earned by, among other things, his votes against ergonomics standards and for restricting union political activities. Outgoing Chairman Kennedy has a 93 percent lifetime AFL-CIO record, and he scored 100 percent this year. </p>
<p>
The biggest changes here will come on questions of labor and education, as prescription drugs and pension reform go mainly through other committees. Gregg has some actively anti-labor proposals on his docket. In a postelection press release, he announced that two of his priorities would be "to ensure that private sector employees have the same rights and freedoms that government workers have to take time off in lieu of overtime pay" and "to push for legislative and regulatory clarification of the Family and Medical Leave Act." These mean less pay for long hours and a more difficult life for workers with children. And you can plain forget about raising the minimum wage, a cause dear to Kennedy's heart. Kennedy also held numerous hearings highlighting the ongoing deficiencies in workplace safety, health insurance and medical privacy. (Indeed, Kennedy has announced that, minority status notwithstanding, he will introduce legislation requiring employers to ante up more for workers' health insurance.) Gregg is about as likely to take up these causes as he is to become a member of the International Socialists.</p>
<p>
Gregg may also precipitate a battle over school vouchers, which he has a history of supporting. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) comes up for reauthorization this year, and the new chairman is likely to lard it with a vouchers provision. Not only would this presage things to come in the general education bill, it could well precipitate a Democratic filibuster. "If they include vouchers into the IDEA reauthorization, it's going to be a long, drawn out, bloody debate," said one Democratic Senate aide. Gregg is also likely to push for lower funding of higher-education Pell Grants, and for more scrutiny of the Head Start program, as both policies come up for reauthorization this year. </p>
<p>
Although some have been surprised at how well such differing personalities as Gregg and Kennedy worked together, the two nevertheless have very different priorities. All of which is why the <i>Prospect</i> sees this as one of the biggest committee shifts in the Senate.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">4. Small Investors, Smaller Clout<br /><br />
The Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs: <br /><br />
Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) to Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)</span><br /><br /><br />
Outgoing chairman paul sarbanes has been a staunch liberal in his voting record, but until this year's Sarbanes-Oxley Act (aimed at corporate-accounting reform), he was not leading many notable offensives. For his part, incoming Chairman Richard Shelby has earned a reputation as a bit of a fair-weather populist. He expects to hold further hearings with Sarbanes on financial privacy and has called for independent-minded replacements for both former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt and William Webster, former head of the SEC's public accounting-oversight board. And because these replacements will be the featured attraction early on, Shelby may come out of the gates not far from where Sarbanes left off. He even plans hearings on whether lawmakers went too far in erasing the boundaries between commercial and investment banks. Marty Gruenberg, Sarbanes' chief of staff, notes that things could be worse, "I could paint you a horror scenario, but in all of Shelby's comments thus far, he hasn't said things that are different from Sarbanes."</p>
<p>
But that's the problem: Shelby has been silent about the stuff on which he and Sarbanes part company. "Regulatory relief" bills "remain a possibility," says Shelby spokeswoman Andrea Andrews. Nor has Shelby piped up about defending the poor from predatory lending practices. In fact, Shelby has become more of an advocate for industry and Wall Street in recent times, earning a 93 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce two years in a row after having lingered between 70 percent and 80 percent. (Sarbanes is in the 35 percent to 40 percent range.) While Shelby is no Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who chaired the Banking Committee in the 1990s with an unmatched deregulatory fanaticism, he <i>will</i> go to bat for the big guys. </p>
<p>
In a climate of Republican war unity, and with conservative Republicans beside him, the <i>Prospect</i> predicts that Shelby's populist talk will dissolve into a pro-business walk.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">5. Enrich-the-Rich Obsessive Succeeds Balanced-Budget Compulsive <br /><br />
The Committee on the Budget: <br /><br />
Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) to Don Nickles (R-Okla.)</span><br /><br /><br />
Incoming chairman Don Nickles certainly loves cutting taxes, but he has occasionally met a tax cut he didn't like. Take the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax rebate for poverty-wage workers. As Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, "Nickles has generally been one of the most severe critics of the Earned Income Tax Credit." In 1995 Nickles pushed to reduce the EITC by $66 billion over seven years, even while agitating for an upper-bracket tax cut. In other words, tax cuts are all well and good, but only if they redistribute wealth in an upward direction. It's no shock that Nickles wants to see the Bush tax cut made permanent.</p>
<p>
Nickles loves cutting spending, too, but not quite as much. As his soon-to-be predecessor Kent Conrad points out, "The problem is that the spending cuts that he will push for are not in the areas where the big new spending is occurring: defense, homeland security." That means not only "less support for education and expansion of health-care coverage," but "bigger deficits and more debt." Nickles is still enough of a deficit hawk that he'll also push for a replacement at the helm of the Congressional Budget Office who favors the so-called dynamic scoring of budget projections, a forecasting method that hides the red ink. (For his part, Conrad tended to be a green-eyeshade Democrat, a budget balancer who wasn't crazy about fiscal stimuli or other Keynesian strategies.) </p>
<p>
A Nickles spokeswoman shrugs off accusations that her boss will gut domestic programs. "The senator's No. 1 priority will be passing a budget, unlike this year," she says. Beyond that, no details are forthcoming. The committee under Conrad was indeed unable to pass a 2003 budget. If Nickles can do better for 2004, he'll be able to stick in reconciliation instructions -- filibuster-proof provisions that legislate policy changes in revenue and entitlement programs. Those will come in handy when it's time to grease the skids for those Republican tax and spending cuts.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">6. The Sun Also Sets<br /><br />
The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources: <br /><br />
Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) to Pete Domenici (R-N.M.)</span><br /><br /><br />
New Mexico may retain the chair of this committee, but things now look much better for the Bush-Cheney energy bill. Still, stances on energy issues align in all sorts of ways. Jeff Bingaman (outgoing) and Pete Domenici (incoming) went with their respective parties on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but on nuclear-energy issues both stay true to their roots (New Mexico being birthplace of the Atomic Age and home to the Los Alamos and Sandia national research labs). Both voted to approve the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump and to reauthorize the 1954 Price-Anderson Act, which limits the disaster liability of the nuclear-power industry. And there are legislative-executive fault lines, too, as just about everyone on the committee opposed White House plans to force deregulation on electricity markets through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.</p>
<p>
But the fact remains that Domenici is much more unequivocal than Bingaman in his support of energy production, whether by nuclear or fossil fuel, and less interested in conservation and renewable energy. Nor will he give much attention to Energy Committee member Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) Enron-inspired energy-trading reform bill. And whether or not Democrats can still block drilling in ANWR, says Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen, "The real bonanza for the oil industry is the $34 billion in tax breaks that the House passed for the energy sector for doing what it's already doing." Those may prove harder to keep out of Domenici's bill than they would out of Bingaman's. </p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">7. Agribiz Feeling Its Oats<br /><br />
The Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry: <br /><br />
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)</span><br /><br /><br />
One farm state stalwart hands off to another. That means, come drought or dropping crop prices, the Agriculture Committee will keep trying to make green acres the place to be. Of course, the farm bill already having been passed, the committee's responsibilities will mostly entail overseeing the law's implementation. But American farmers no doubt still count themselves lucky that Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the senior Republican on the committee, opted to take the Foreign Relations chair. Lugar, unlike both outgoing Chairman Tom Harkin and incoming Chairman Thad Cochran, voted against the 2002 Farm Bill and made no secret of his opposition to its $190 billion in farm subsidies.</p>
<p>
Harkin and Cochran have major differences of their own, however. Harkin is more passionate about conservation and renewable energy, but more circumspect in his acceptance of genetically modified crops. But in agriculture, arguments often develop along regional as much as party lines. The cotton, rice and peanuts grown in Cochran's Mississippi tend to be more expensive and to come from larger-scale operations, which helps explain Cochran's opposition to a subsidy cap to farms, no matter how big. The cap, which Harkin and some fellow senators unsuccessfully tried to include in the farm bill, would have favored smaller farmers such as those in Harkin's Iowa.</p>
<p>
So while Cochran and the Republicans may tinker a bit with the farm bill, they're not likely to change it much, and Cochran will most likely prove inhospitable to efforts to dilute it. Nonetheless, according to Neil Ritchie, executive director of the League of Rural Voters, "There's still the matter of appropriating the money, and each of the program lines will be considered one by one. The federal budget's not likely to improve because of the economy. There'll be pressure to cut spending."</p>
<p>
One of Harkin's prized provisions, the Conservation Security Program, which rewards farmers for environmentally friendly farming practices, has already shriveled on the vine, as the Republican-controlled House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee downgraded it to a small pilot program.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">8. A Measure of the Maverick <br /><br />
The Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation: <br />Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) to John McCain (R-Ariz.)</span><br /><br /><br />
As in all things, John McCain is hard to classify when it comes to the issues he'll face as Commerce Committee chairman. With the head of a deregulator but a heart that goes out to the little guy, the Arizona Republican, in the words of Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of the Media Access Project, "is not just a maverick, he's also a little bit eccentric." What's more, politics tends to be especially local on the sorts of issues the Commerce Committee faces. On telecommunications regulation, for example, which will take up a good deal of the committee's time, Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was a big booster of Mississippi-based WorldCom, a company that was furiously lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to intervene on its behalf. </p>
<p>
As of yet, McCain hasn't come out for or against the Baby Bells, and that distinction determines whether, like outgoing Chairman Fritz Hollings, he'll push FCC Chairman Michael Powell to make the Bells open up their lines to competition. Odds are he won't, but as Colin Crowell, a House Democratic staffer who specializes in telecommunications legislation points out, "One of the things to be very, very wary of is classifying a McCain chairmanship as less regulatory than a Hollings chairmanship. Though McCain voted against the 1996 telecom act, he voted for the 1992 cable act, which regulated cable rates and programming and the market access of satellite companies."</p>
<p>
As for the Federal Trade Commission, McCain will probably be much easier on his former Hanoi Hilton roommate, FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle, and not push, as Hollings has, for more vigorous antitrust enforcement. On media conglomeration, McCain's most likely to let Powell dismantle the restrictions on a company's owning of too large a share of local media markets. But then again, he might be so peeved at the broadcasting companies for stripping free television time out of his campaign-finance bill that he'll decide to stick it to them. </p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">9. Not Cheney's Model Chairman<br /><br />
The Committee on Foreign Relations: <br /><br />
Joseph Biden (D-Del.) to Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)</span><br /><br /><br />
If it had been up to Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, incoming Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar would have opted instead to chair the Agriculture Committee or lose himself in the Library of Congress stacks -- anything but oversee the nation's foreign policy. Lugar, says Lawrence Korb, director of national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, "represents the [former National Security Adviser] Brent Scowcroft strain. If I were [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, I would be thrilled to see Lugar in there." </p>
<p>
Something of an internationalist with a passion for corralling loose nukes, Lugar is not likely to call hearings on a war in progress, but neither is he a Pentagon pushover. Bolstered by Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who had the guts to point out that the administration warmongers were a bunch of chicken hawks, Lugar <i>is</i> likely to convene some awkward hearings for Bush about North Korea, about the need for multilateral cooperation, and about the necessity of increasing our foreign aid to the allied and the occupied. Korb thinks Lugar might even be tougher on the right-wing ideologues than outgoing Chairman Joe Biden. "Their philosophical positions are the same," says Korb, "but Biden was handicapped because the Democrats didn't want to look soft on foreign policy. And John Kerry (D-Mass.) is a war hero, but you didn't hear him saying things like Hagel about, 'These guys don't know anything about war.'" </p>
<p>
Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, concurs. "The change from [Jesse] Helms [R-N.C. and the last Republican to chair the Foreign Relation Committee] to Lugar is more significant than the change from Democrat to Republican. The Democrats are so bad on foreign policy that the change in the Senate doesn't mean much." Still, it's a sorry state of affairs when the best you can do is breathe a sigh of relief that Helms is gone. And don't expect Lugar to do anything more than hold some embarrassing hearings and fight for more foreign aid. Once war has begun, Republicans know how to toe the party line.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">10. Republican Regular Succeeds Democratic Disaster <br /><br />
The Committee on Finance: <br /><br />
Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)</span><br /><br /><br />
Although the committee under outgoing chairman Max Baucus was far from liberal, under incoming Chairman Chuck Grassley it will move unambiguously to the right. While Grassley has worked closely with Baucus, it was chiefly because Baucus, in recent years, has often been a Democrat in name only. Baucus led the charge of the 12 Democratic senators who crossed party lines to support President Bush's tax cut in 2001, crippling social programs for years to come while throwing a cool trillion at America's wealthiest citizens. He was the strategist and floor manager for the bill granting Bush fast-track trade authority, a measure that 90 percent of House Democrats and a majority of Senate Democrats opposed as enabling corporations to undermine worker rights, environmental standards and state sovereignty. All of which is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave Baucus a 71 percent rating this year, up from 46 percent the year before. (Grassley's rating, meanwhile, was a nifty 100 percent.)</p>
<p>
For his part, Grassley has long since pledged to make last year's tax cut permanent. Martha Coven, senior legislative associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says, "Grassley will largely take his cues from the White House on taxes. But on other issues he may take the edge off what the White House and the House does." This could be especially true on Medicare, pension reform and welfare-reform reauthorization. Grassley Spokeswoman Beth Pellet says one of the senator's top priorities will be "Medicare equity in conjunction with prescription-drug benefits for seniors." As an expert on aging issues, Grassley will likely turn this into a better bill than the one that would emerge if, say, a Trent Lott were running the committee. But don't expect the kind of sweeping expansion of coverage that many Democrats (though not necessarily Baucus) would support. The pensions bill will also come before the committee, but Grassley's commitment to reform probably won't extend much beyond excising the most truly lunatic of the pro-business provisions that his right-wing colleagues will cook up. Grassley has also stated that when welfare-reform reauthorization comes up, "Work requirements need strengthening." </p>
<p>
Grassley is less ideological than a number of his Republican colleagues, but he will be backed (or constrained) by party leaders Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell, and by an exacting party discipline.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 06 Dec 2002 19:22:34 +0000142876 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettThe Fly-by-Night 107thhttp://prospect.org/article/fly-night-107th
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">A</span>s the 107th Congress limps into the midterm elections without having passed most of its routine spending bills, it's safe to say that the legislative branch hasn't been a model of efficiency. But, then again, there are worse things than gridlock. The GOP had big plans in 2000 for its House-Senate-White House axis. Those designs were frustrated by Sen. Jim Jeffords' (I-Vt.) defection and then marginalized by the war on terrorism. But we know what those deferred dreams look like: weakened unions; privatized Social Security; an increasingly religious public sphere; a financial sector trusted to police itself; further deregulation of utilities; and the dwindling of welfare benefits, public-health safeguards and access to abortion. </p>
<p>
Some of this philosophy surfaced in debates over the tax cut, campaign-finance reform or corporate reform, all of which became law. Other elements of the Republican manifesto are more quietly working their way toward law. Many are included in bills that have already passed the House and moved on to the Senate, where the most extreme provisions are more likely to be ignored or tempered. But Republican control of the Senate would make passage of such legislation all the more likely. Here are a few examples:</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">Welfare reform and "healthy marriages."</span> Back in May, the House passed a welfare-reform proposal nearly identical to the "70-40" plan the Bush administration had announced in February. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), required that states that do not have 70 percent of families receiving welfare benefits working at least 40 hours a week by 2007 will be punished by having their block grants cut. To the extent that the plan received attention, which wasn't much, critics focused on its strict and counterproductive work requirements, rules that discouraged investment in training or education and encouraged states to simply cut off families rather than to help them find work. </p>
<p>
But besides endangering the fragile success of the 1996 Clinton welfare-reform bill, the House tacked a "healthy-marriages" provision onto the bill, allocating $300 million to pro-marriage grants. The money could be spent on anything from counseling sessions to television commercials and lectures to extra welfare benefits for those couples who stay married. In short, this provision was a form of marriage insurance -- federally funded, no less -- that conservatives could love. Aside from the galling intrusion into private life that it represents, there's the question of why money ostensibly earmarked for welfare benefits should be spent on television time and high-school abstinence lectures. The Senate has yet to vote on its counterpart measure.</p>
<p>
Unable to come to an agreement on the bill, Congress has passed a continuing resolution preserving the status quo through the end of the year. After that, says Mark Greenberg, director of policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy, "There are still a million possibilities," maybe a three-month, one-year, three-year or (though unlikely) five-year extension. If Congress does go for something more long term, Greenberg thinks the parties would want to "reduce the number of issues in dispute" -- an important goal in every healthy marriage. That means compromise language on the marriage-promotion grants: either limiting the amount of money or restricting the ways in which it could be spent.</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">What's good for General Motors is good for Homeland Security.</span> Eighty-five percent of the country's critical infrastructure -- for example, power and chemical plants, ports, banks and electricity grids -- are privately owned. The utility, phone and gas companies that own it, however, have proven reluctant to give up detailed information to the proposed Department of Homeland Security for fear, they say, that any plans would find their way into the hands of potential saboteurs, terrorists or even curious competitors. To address this fear, the House's Homeland Security bill exempts any information pertaining to "the security of critical infrastructure and protected systems" from the Freedom of Information Act, which requires that federal agencies release information to anyone who requests it in writing. </p>
<p>
There are, however, plenty of people besides terrorists and competitors who might have questions about critical infrastructure: environmentalists worried about a polluting chemical plant, for example, or labor activists investigating an unsafe factory. One easy way to prevent them from getting such information is to designate it "Critical Infrastructure Information" (CII). Gary Bass, of OMB Watch, an organization that monitors the federal budget and regulatory processes directed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, offers another example: "Imagine that you are a company that takes credit card [numbers] over the Internet, and there was a virus in your system so that all the credit cards became public. You can stamp all of that information CII and turn it over to the government, so no action can be taken on it." </p>
<p>
The White House, which originally suggested the exemption, insists it is actually quite narrow. But the fact is that, unlike the Senate version of the bill, neither the White House nor the House of Representatives bothers to specify what constitutes a security issue, as opposed to an environmental or labor issue. Both prefer simply to trust the companies themselves to make the call. "Amazingly enough," says Bass, "this was thought up post-Enron."</p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">Faith-based Firing.</span> When the president announced his faith-based initiative, with its "charitable-choice" provisions greatly increasing the array of federal grants available to religious organizations, critics drew the alarming image of soup kitchens ladling out religious homilies along with meals in what would amount to government-sponsored proselytizing.</p>
<p>
Less discussed was the question of whether government funding should affect religious charities' ability to hire and fire on the basis of their beliefs. The administration and the House contend that funding shouldn't affect the charities hiring-and-firing practices. In fact, the J.C. Watts-sponsored House bill expressly exempted religious organizations receiving federal funds from having to comply with local and state antidiscrimination laws. As a recent lawsuit brought by two therapists from a Methodist children's home in Georgia shows, this question isn't merely academic. One of the therapists charges that he was refused a job because he is Jewish, the other that she was fired because she is a lesbian. The Senate version of the bill has no "charitable-choice" provisions and might eventually include specific antidiscrimination language. </p>
<p>
<span class="subhead">Chipping away at choice.</span> Here, not surprisingly, was where the difference between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate was drawn most vividly. The House voted twice against overturning a ban on any abortions in overseas military hospitals (even when the servicewoman in question would pay for the abortion herself); passed a bill making it a federal crime for anyone other than a legal guardian to transport a minor across state lines to get an abortion; and, most recently, approved a bill allowing hospitals, HMOs and insurance companies to keep their federal funding even if they refuse to perform, provide referrals for or pay for abortions. The Senate either refused to consider or voted down all of the above bills. </p>
<p>
Of course, the House has always been the more mercurial of the two chambers of Congress, and in the Senate the minority is not so easy to steamroll. But there are plenty of Republican senators who support all of the above ideas. Indeed, back when he was majority leader, Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was stopped from bringing similar abortion bills to a Senate vote solely by the threat of a Clinton veto. In the end, there's not much for the rest of us to do but vote and watch and wait. If Republicans net a single Senate seat in the elections this fall, they'll be able to start the 108th Congress where they left off in June 2001, when Jeffords left the GOP and tilted the Senate majority to the Democrats.</p>
<p><i>Drake Bennett is a </i>Prospect<i> writing fellow.</i></p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Mon, 04 Nov 2002 15:30:18 +0000142838 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettThe Usual Suspectshttp://prospect.org/article/usual-suspects
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t's safe to say anyone who showed up in a salacious frame of mind at last Friday's "We'd Rather Wear Nothing Than Wear Gap" rally went home disappointed. On the corner across from the Georgetown Gap, the gang of so-called "Gaptivists" took a page out of the old PETA playbook, evoking the "I'd Rather Wear Nothing Than Wear Fur" ads of the early 1990s in which nude supermodels bared all to save their furry friends. However, when it came time for the rally's closing communal striptease, only a few brave souls dared to show just how naked their sense of outrage was. And they only got down to their (presumably non-Gap) underwear. </p>
<p>In fact, it's hard to imagine that anyone who showed up Friday, no matter what their motivation, felt they got their money's worth. The rally was jointly organized by "Save the Redwoods/Boycott the Gap" and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees' "Global Justice for Garment Workers Campaign" -- and its agenda was as cluttered as those facts might suggest. The sweatshop plank was easy enough to make sense of: The Gap has been public enemy No. 2 (after Nike) for the anti-sweatshop movement, despite the company's seemingly earnest but admittedly ineffectual efforts to address its critics' demands.</p>
<p>The redwood connection wasn't immediately evident, but, according to a flyer passed around, the Fisher family, which owns Gap, Inc., also owns a company that logs California's redwood trees. And the "No license to kill fish" sign? That could be explained by the salmon that choke on the runoff from treeless hillsides. But while it's easy to chalk up the cries of "there will be no freedom until there is revolution" to the emotion of the moment, what do we make of the speaker who talked at length about the vital but totally unrelated question of South American water privatization?</p>
<p>Besides all that, there was the discouraging impression that the whole thing was simply being tolerated, like a tantrum. It was a sort of Potemkin protest, with journalists nearly outnumbering demonstrators and everything cleanly hemmed in by lines of police in samurai-like riot gear. At the end of the rally, as the strippers were gathering up their clothes, a call-and-response chant went up: "Whose streets? Our streets!" Not 30 seconds later, one of the organizers announced that the police were asking that everyone clear the sidewalks so people could get through. The Gaptivists docilely complied; after all, it wouldn't do to obstruct pedestrian traffic. Whose streets were those again?</p>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he sun came out Saturday for the main rally and march and everyone played their roles to perfection. The police were grim-faced and stolid, the demonstrators were plastered with stickers and full of chants and the 20-odd anti-demonstrators brandished Old Glory and spat anti-communist invective with a glee that showed just how much they missed the bad old days of the Cold War. But no matter how often the protesters shouted "No more business as usual!" business as usual was exactly what was going on. </p>
<p>The rally started around noon along the southern slope of the Mall just under the Washington Monument. From the stage came a liturgical intonation of the injustices and cruelties of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- from nongovernmental-organization leaders, Bolivian union organizers, South African workers, Ralph Nader, American AIDS activists and a hardcore band called Blowback. Above the crowd rose a tugboat-sized blow-up shark with the earth in its jaws ("Stop IMF Loan-Sharking") and an even larger blow-up pig ("Hog-tied by Corporate Greed"). There was a life-sized cardboard tractor protesting Caterpillar's sale of "the machinery of death" to Israel (the bulldozers used to level Palestinian Authority offices and Palestinian homes) and a woman on stilts dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her tablet reading "Not in my name." A small knot of people sporting Service Employees International Union T-shirts only served to emphasize the striking lack of local labor union presence. Halfway through, an anti-war march made its way across the Mall and joined the throng, and a little later a band of black-clad anarchists came through, beating drums in a grim conga line. At one point the emcee passed along a request from the park police that protesters not climb in the trees: "Please remember that we are an environmental organization. We don't want to hurt the trees."</p>
<p>There was the usual mix of activists and the merely active. Josh Dimon, an intern at Environmental Defense who specializes in export-credit agencies, was happy to speak at length about the strangulating effects of U.S. trade policy on the markets of developing countries. Fellow protester Elaine Russell's grievances were more general. She wanted to see "a paradigm shift in the terms of ownership of property" because "our ego is where we realize the oneness of all of us; that consciousness is hardest to achieve by people with excessive power and privilege." She held a sign with George W. Bush and the number 666 beneath him, an anathema he had earned for his "predatory spreading of fundamentalist Christianity." Another man made his way through the crowd passing out flyers urging a change of the American national symbols -- a green fringe on the flag instead of gold, a globe or sheaf of wheat instead of the finial Roman eagle -- to something less martial and more celebratory of grassroots organizations and social justice.</p>
<p>In <i>The Armies of the Night</i>, Norman Mailer's account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon, the author laments the futility of the idea entertained by some of his fellow marchers that they would be able to get inside the building and disrupt its inner workings. The Pentagon's power, he observes, is not centralized, but diffused among the warren of offices; there is no one place to strike. The IMF and the World Bank present similar difficulties. But for Saturday's marchers, these difficulties remained, at best, theoretical ones -- because they never got near the buildings. </p>
<p>The march, when it started around 3 p.m., was a few thousand strong. It proceeded north along 15th Street by the treasury department. Along the way, it picked up a young woman named Lissa Tucker. She'd been out on a power walk and had been "swept up in a tsunami of protesters." She professed to not knowing much about the IMF or the World Bank, but said she was concerned about where President Bush was taking the country. She seemed happy enough with the slow pace and frequent stops and only mildly concerned that the barricades made it impossible for her to get out when she wanted to. So she and the marchers turned left on I Street and, after a few blocks, spilled out into Farragut Square, where they milled around between the perpendicular phalanxes of police that marked the terminus. Then she slipped out and across the street and went to get a late lunch.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 30 Sep 2002 10:48:17 +0000139945 at http://prospect.orgDrake BennettBallot Botchhttp://prospect.org/article/ballot-botch
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">M</span>elodrama may be the dramatic genre of choice in political campaigning, but there's nothing like a good farce to get some attention.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Take for instance Washington, D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary. On the night of Sept. 5, at a forum at the University of the District of Columbia, five of the six candidates sat behind a long table on the stage of the school's auditorium. James Clark stood when it was his turn to speak and, employing incantatory cadences, exhorted the mostly black audience of a couple hundred to "cut the water off from Congress" until it accedes to the district's demands. "I don't know no Bush," he went on. "I don't have a president. We need to get back to Afro Americanism."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>To his left, the phlegmatic and perpetually disoriented Bishop Osie Thorpe promised parking places to UDC students ("This isn't horse-and-buggy times, we can't just tie our horses up anywhere") as well as Christmas presents for all, then lapsed into incomprehensible homilies. The Rev. Douglas Moore, a former Council of the District of Columbia member, was more concrete in his promises and focused in his accusations, but was undercut by his tendency to yell into the microphone as if chastising a stubborn, deaf baby -- with earsplitting results. (Clark also had microphone problems. When his mike cut out abruptly, he dropped it to the floor in disgust, raising his voice to say, "I don't need no white man's microphone.")<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>At the far end of the table sat a neat man with a drawn face. He spoke in a measured, flat tone, was roundly booed and heckled, and looked ahead stoically while his fellow candidates repeatedly turned to harangue him. He left early, exiting stage right as the sixth candidate, an "exotic ballet dancer" and cabaret performer known simply as Faith, made her belated entrance stage left, wearing a straw hat over a tentacular, beaded flapper headdress and blowing a charge on her bugle.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The no-doubt-grateful escapee was the district's current mayor, Anthony Williams. He is an incumbent running on the strength of having turned around a legendarily troubled local government. He is a Democrat in a campaign where there is no real Republican opposition. His campaign seems like it would be a cakewalk -- except that he isn't on the ballot. The reasons behind this absence, and the unlikely write-in campaign he's waging as a result, show how much Williams is haunted by the legacy of his predecessor, Marion Barry.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>As the UDC forum might suggest, it doesn't take much to get into the mayoral primary. All one needs are 2,000 nominating signatures. Williams submitted 10,000 back in July, but, in a development unique even in the through-the-looking-glass world of district politics, an election board found that the majority were forgeries and barred him from the ballot.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Most observers agree that Williams' petition debacle was simply a matter of poor oversight. According to Jamin Raskin, a law professor at American University, "The real story is that Williams has very shallow roots in the D.C. political culture. Signature-gathering has always been the bread and butter of a politician's most intimate volunteers, but Williams doesn't have a cadre of volunteers who've followed him for years as Marion Barry did." So Williams hired out the work, offering a dollar a signature, and apparently no Williams staff members looked over the results that came back. (If they had, they might have been surprised to see that Donald Rumsfeld, Martha Stewart and Kofi Annan had all supposedly offered their support, that whole swaths of district Democrats had identical handwriting and that one of his volunteers was out gathering signatures on the nonexistent date of June 31.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>After losing a court appeal of the decision, Williams announced his campaign as a write-in for the Democratic nomination. Another write-in candidate, the Rev. Willie F. Wilson, pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, soon joined him on the campaign trail. Best known as the "spiritual guide" who helped Barry to personal redemption (and another term as mayor) after an infamous crack episode, Wilson has presented himself as the heir to Barry's mantle -- and, as such, a sort of anti-Williams.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Much has been made of the perception that Williams, while African American, is not "black" enough for the district's predominantly black electorate. In this city, race is intertwined with politics in ways that go beyond mere demographics. From its founding, the district has had a large black population and, because of the number of jobs in the federal government, it was the first American city to have a thriving black middle class. In large part because of that population, southern segregationists in Congress long denied the city self-rule. The fight for self-government was therefore also a fight for black voting rights. As Raskin points out, the political figures such as Barry that helped bring home rule to the district in 1974 and then controlled the city thereafter were products of the civil-rights movement, with its often fiery rhetoric of street organization and solidarity.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Williams, on the other hand, is a self-professed technocrat. A bow-tie-wearing graduate of Yale University with advanced degrees in law and public policy from Harvard University, he served as Barry's chief financial officer before riding to office four years ago as a wonkish Mr. Fix-It for the city's broken-down government. By many standards, he has excelled in exactly that role: The murder rate has dropped sharply, the police force is more professional, investment is flowing in, potholes get filled, garbage gets picked up, there are fewer crimes and there are fewer rats. And last year, after five years of balanced budgets, the city finally shed the financial control board that Congress had put in place in 1995 to impose order on the district's disastrous finances.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But some of the city's poorer residents charge that improvements in public works and infrastructure have not been matched by improvements in social services -- that while Williams, as Clark poetically puts it, is "over there tap dancing to European music," the inner city is getting left behind. Wilson, who last week received Barry's endorsement, has capitalized on these suspicions, describing himself as "a leader, not a manager" for those "who have felt the sting of an unresponsive government." He has taken as his cause célèbre Williams' decision to support shutting down the city's only public medical facility, the ailing D.C. General Hospital, over the unanimous opposition of the city council and thousands of angry residents.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, Wilson's accusations tend to discount the enormity of the mess Barry left behind, and it's all but impossible to make the case that any aspect of city governance is actually worse than it was four years ago. Nonetheless, Barry's shadow lingers: both the easy charisma and the us-versus-them rhetoric he relied upon to sustain his black base of support. Watching Williams in front of an audience, one wonders if his difficulties aren't simply a matter of style. His early exit from the UDC forum, for example, was somewhat graceless: He rose abruptly and refused the moderator's request to answer one last question, inciting more opprobrium than he'd received at any other point in the evening. Afterward, his competitors turned the way the mayor "walked out on us" into the motif of the evening. (Wilson also left early, a few minutes after Williams, but he lubricated his departure with an extended explanation of how, with limited funds, his campaign was trying to reach as many people as possible and, to that end, he had three more events that evening. He exited to hearty applause.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Despite everything, Williams still enjoys a comfortable lead in the primary race. Last week a <i>Washington Post</i> poll gave him 44 percent of the prospective vote, while Wilson, his nearest challenger, got only 10 percent. Williams' job approval rating was 59 percent, down only 2 percent from May. And Washington voters have of course been known to be rather forgiving in the past. (Also, for what it's worth, both Clark and Moore have overcome past stumbles: In Clark's case, it was hitting a Barry aide with a metal chair; in Moore's, it was biting a tow-truck driver.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In some ways, the nature of Williams' petition stumble has protected him. Before he was dropped from the ballot, as Hal Wolman, director of George Washington University's Institute of Public Policy, points out, "Everyone else was driven out of the water by Williams' overwhelming superiority in vote-getting" -- by the perception that he was a shoo-in. The timing of the scandal ensured that anyone who jumped into the race afterward would also have to run as a write-in and open themselves, as Wilson has, to charges of blatant opportunism.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The morning after the UDC forum, the candidates were at GWU for a similar event. This one was broadcast live on local radio station WTOP and punctuated every 10 minutes by the latest report from the station's traffic correspondent. At one point, somewhere between when Clark advocated painting the White House black and when Thorpe announced that he had predicted not only September 11 but the shooting of Ronald Reagan (though he was, he admitted, one day off), Williams put into words his bewilderment and frustration: "Sometimes I feel like I'm a radio astronomer reaching out to some sort of reality." His primary campaign has indeed taken him into uncharted territory, but chances are the signals he's sending out will bring back signs of life.</p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Tue, 10 Sep 2002 01:11:33 +0000139934 at http://prospect.orgDrake Bennett